


to the bare bane

by bookhobbit



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asexual Character, Asexuality, Disabled Character, M/M, Pre-Canon, Slow Burn, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Transitioning, gothic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-10-31 02:26:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17840636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookhobbit/pseuds/bookhobbit
Summary: When Phyllis Norrell goes to York on a mission for books, the last thing she expects to find is a new servant. When Joan Childermass comes to Hurtfew for an unexpected job opportunity, the last thing she expects to do is plan a murder.(Or: in which Mr Norrell and Childermass are both trans men, and transition after meeting.)





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Although I've tagged this with the AU tag, I've taken great pains to make it canon compliant, and the only reason I feel it ought to be tagged AU is because some of the events in this fic are too exciting and/or scandalous for Drawlight not to have dug them up and talked about them. There's nothing that outright contradicts any of the events of the novel.
> 
> This fic is not quite finished yet; I have about 16k of it done and the rest is coming together rather slowly. I'll be posting it a chapter at a time about every week or so until I run out and then new stuff as it comes. So...no promises about schedule.
> 
> Also, the first part of this fic contains a lot of pre-transition material, so a lot of she-ing with Childermass and Norrell both so if you'd find that in any way triggering, this may not be a good fic for you.

When all else fails, the streets of York are an ever-ready provider. Childermass has tried reading cards, has tried finding some rich young person in need of company, has even tried work down the docks, though she's out of practice with hauling.

She chooses a victim more or less at random. Safer that way. There's a lady just in front of her wearing plain but good-quality clothes and clutching her cloak around her as if she fears the world will fall in on her. That's a good one: nerves and good clothes make an excellent target.

She moves in a little closer, just brushes past, whispering the words her mother taught her as she draws the coin purse out of the pocket. The jostle will never be noticed, not in this crowd, so there's only the -- 

The woman turns at just the wrong moment, and Childermass is looking down into a pair of startled blue-grey eyes.

One crowded half-second passes while Childermass drops the coin purse back in the pocket and takes a step back, trying to look as though she's merely been given a jolt by the woman's sudden turn. She takes in more of her intended at the same time. 

This is a woman of no great height and no great beauty either, with small shadowed eyes that dart quickly, here and there. Her hair is done back with a plainness that would suit someone twice her age -- she's probably about thirty -- and her mouth is an unhappy slash in her face. She looks astonished rather than angry, which gives Childermass cautious hope.

"What was that?" she demands as Childermass takes another step back. 

"A mistake, miss." Childermass puts her hands up a little. "I didn't mean to jostle you."

"No, not that, I know you were picking my pockets," says the woman as if theft is a distant afterthought. "The magic. You did magic."

Childermass blinks. "It weren't nothing." In fact it was a charm meant to stop metal from clinking, and Childermass has never even been sure it worked.

"It was something, I felt it." The woman leans closer. "What was its purpose? Where did you learn it?"

Under the unexpected line of questioning, Childermass is too startled to guard her reply. "Only from my ma."

The woman's lips purse. "Your mother? Who was she? A witch?"

Childermass can't decide if Ma'd have been insulted or flattered by that. Possibly both. "Miss, we're blocking the road."

The woman makes an impatient noise and takes Childermass by the elbow, directing her towards a nearby inn. It's got the unthinking air of someone distracted by something very much more important than mere issues of space and time. She buys Childermass an ale and nothing for herself, urges her to a seat in the corner.

"Now, the spell. What's it meant to do?"

"It stops coins making a noise when you draw them out," says Childermass -- after all, she's not likely to have a constable called on her at this late juncture, especially not if she pleases the woman. 

"Hmm." The woman rubs her hands together. "A cantrip, and yet it worked, I felt it take. Did your mother use much magic?"

"It's not _magic_ ," says Childermass. "It's just a bit of help."

"It was. I'm an expert, you know." The woman says this with the half-defiant casualness of someone who expects to be contradicted. "I've studied all my life, and that was magic."

If it is magic, all the talk of it being gone from England must be wrong, for there's not a fishwife in Yorkshire who doesn't know a half-remembered little bit of help. Childermass shrugs.

The woman rubs her hands together again. "I do have need of a lady's maid," she murmurs half to herself. "Why not?"

In her astonishment, Childermass almost laughs as she picks up her drink. "I'm sorry, Miss, I must not understand you. You'd hire an... _urchin_ who just picked your pocket you off the street to be your _lady's maid_?"

"Picked it with magical aid. Besides, you gave it back. Eight pounds a year and dress allowance," she adds absently. 

Childermass chokes on a mouthful of ale. If this eccentric wants to pay her more money than she's ever had in her life on the strength of one dubious charm, well -- "But I don't even know your name. Nor you mine."

The woman blinks. "What is your name?"

"I'm called Joan Childermass."

"How very peculiar," says the woman. She introduces herself like a man, Christian name nearly forgotten: "I am Norrell. Phyllis Norrell."

-

If anyone's the urchin, really, it's Norrell: she's exactly like a hedgehog in shape and manner. She curls in on herself as soon as she loads Childermass into her much-too-refined carriage and stares out the window for most of the journey. The look on her face says that if anyone thinks of talking to her, the spines will be deployed.

At the start, the coachman tries to talk her out of bringing Childermass home. Childermass can hear them murmuring, snatches of _miss_ _please consider, dirty dress, eyes are wrong_. Norrell is scoffing and, clearly, refusing to explain herself. After a full three minutes of back and forth, Norrell settles the matter by attempting to climb into the carriage herself, a feat she's too short to manage. Childermass gets in first and gives her a hand up, which earns her a baleful glare from the coachman. 

"Thank you," says Norrell uncertainly as she signals the coach to move.

Childermass gives her a nod.

It's after this that the spines come out, and stay that way until they fetch up at an inn for the night. Childermass amuses herself by inventing backstories for this odd woman who knows so much about magic; none of them quite satisfy. After that, she starts planning what she could do with eight pounds a year (save most of it, send the rest home to the few members of her old gang that are still living, a bit here and there to Whitby for the cousins). When that pales -- and it never does to get too attached to money you haven't got yet, so it pales soon -- she wonders exactly what it is that Norrell has planned for her.

It's a respectable coaching inn they stop at, so at least Childermass will get a solid meal.

"You haven't said where we're going," says Childermass as they disembark. 

Norrell gives her a startled look, as if she's forgotten that Childermass is capable of speech in the hours since they last exchanged words. "My home. Hurtfew Abbey. It's fourteen miles outside of York. We will arrive tomorrow."

Now that Childermass comes to think of it, it was unwise to depart with Norrell without having asked their destination. But then, what's she going to do? Take Childermass out to the wilds of rural Yorkshire and murder her gruesomely? Apart from anything else, the coachman's not young and Norrell isn't strong. Childermass is quite sure of her ability to evade murder, and even to survive in the wilds of Yorkshire, if required.

Norrell gives her her own room at the inn. Childermass can't remember the last time she had a real bed all to herself. If they take her out to the moors and try to shoot her now, the sleep will have been worth it, that and the heavy hot supper still warming her belly.

-

At Hurtfew, Childermass is given to understand that she must be quiet, tidy, discreet, competent, punctual, and above all avoid impertinent personal remarks. She wonders how long it will take for Norrell to sack her given the ordering of that particular list, but that's no concern to her: she gets a secondhand but decent warm gown and a bath first thing, so she's already ahead.

She can't remember the last time she had a bath in hot water, either. Here there seems to be buckets and buckets of it, fresh from the laundry-room where it's heated. There's a full bathtub, a real one, for them in the servants' hall as needs it; Norrell, apparently, thinks Childermass does.

The new gown -- a little short on her and a little large about the bust, but that's no mind -- is waiting for her, warmed by the heat of the room, when she gets out.

Oliver-the-footman hasn't had time to turn the kitchen staff against her, as she finds out when she turns up for her first meal. The cook tuts at her and shakes her head.

"Shame," she says, putting a plate of good stew and bread in front of Childermass. "You seem a nice enough lass."

Childermass raises an eyebrow. "What's a shame?"

"It's the mistress," says the scullery maid down the table. "She's a bitch."

"Oh, well," says Childermass dismissively, "So was my mother. So am I, come to think of it."

The cook frowns in half-hearted censure, but the scullery maid laughs. "I'm Jane," she says, "I hope you'll put her in her place."

"Joan," says Childermass. Her Christian name tastes odd on her tongue, but she supposes Norrell will use it. "What's a lady's maid do here? She doesn't look fond of her dress."

"Oh, you'll be a bit more of a secretary, a general helper." Jane points with a bit of bread. "It's why she can't keep a lady's maid, you see, they come expecting to do her hair and they wind up answering her letters. Not the sort of thing they're trained for, a fine lady's maid. And they fuss her to dress better."

"Can't see that'll be a problem for you," puts in Thomas-the-footman from down the table, to general amusement.

Childermass looks at the sleeve of her dress as if she's never seen it before. "What, you think I don't know the latest Parisian fashion?"

More amusement ripples down the table. "I hope you can read and write," Jane puts in.

"Tolerably well." Actually, she reads well in two languages and writes untidily in one, though she tries to make herself look less competent than she is. Perhaps for this position she should have a care about hiding her skills too well.

"Happen you'll last longer, then," says the cook (Mrs Hardbottle, Childermass learns later). "Do you like books?" 

"I've never had enough experience of them to know." A lie, this; Childermass owns one very worn copy of A Child's History of the Raven King, tucked among her clothes in her single bag, bought fourthhand once when her mother had been flush with gambling winnings. She's kept it by for ten years.

"Well, you'll have enough now," says Mrs Hardbottle. "Her library's the only thing she cares about in this life or any other." 

Childermass wonders exactly what she's got herself into. A gentlewoman with a house of her own and a library so large and well-cared for that cooks gossip about it, with a passion for magic so intense that she'd pick a stranger off the street and employ her at an exorbitant rate for the position of lady's-maid-but-really-secretary.

An eccentric, certainly.


	2. a curious sort of servanthood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think there will probably be four proper chapters of this, not counting the prologue or the upcoming interlude between chapters two and three. The half before the interlude (including the interlude itself) is entirely written, and I'm working on the second half now. It's taking me a while because of school, but I think I might manage to finish in time to have the chapter posted on time. We'll see, I guess?
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoy this chapter!

Norrell summons the new maid to the library first thing in the morning. She arrives looking much tidier than Norrell expects; the indistinguished dark grey gown suits her, though her hairstyle has only the loosest nod to decency.

"You could at least wear a cap," Norrell says.

"Why?" says Childermass -- somehow it's hard to think of her as Joan -- propping herself against the wall. "It doesn't do any favors for you."

Norrell's speechless for a moment. "That's a personal remark," she manages to say. "We did discuss that."

"Ah, yes," says Childermass. For a brief moment she looks shifty, perhaps uncertain. "You'll have to forgive me. I'm not in the habit of restraining my mouth."

"I can see that," says Norrell. "I suppose that's what I earned for picking a maid up off the street. Can you read?"

"Yes."

"Can you write?"

Childermass seems to hesitate for a moment. "Yes. English and a little French, though my spelling is abysmal in the latter, I'm told."

Norrell raises her eyebrows. "French spelling is abysmal on its own merits."

Childermass raises a hand to her mouth and coughs. Norrell continues, "As you may have already been told, for I know the maids gossip, the position I expect you to take up is less the role of the typical abigail than you might be expecting, although I will still require your assistance in dressing. I will expect you to assist me with my letters, keep personal accounts for me, and help me in the library. To this end, I will teach you any skills you do not have yet."

There's a flicker of something, well-disguised, on Childermass's face. "As you wish."

"I would like to test your reading and writing capabilities," says Norrell, fetching The Blue Book by Valentine Munday off the shelf. She opens the book to a passage at random and hands it to Childermass. "Read it aloud."

Childermass begins "It is said time in the Other Lands are in-incompatible with Christian thought, and that this is why Christians so rarely go there. How can this be so? For if we are to understand Faerie as a place anti...thetical to Christianity, how can the Raven King have ruled there?" Here and there she stumbles on a word that's clearly unfamiliar to her, and her pronunciation is poor on most of them, but she reads with a steadiness that reassures Norrell. Norrell takes the book and puts it back up.

"Dictation," she says. Childermass picks up a sheet of paper and a pen without being told to do so and sits down at the little desk in the corner. "Memorandum: Valentine Munday may have an entirely confused view of the whole structure of Faerie, but his perspective is certainly interesting as regards the relative usefulness and danger of the average fairy. Moreover, if we rely on fairies to do all our magic for us, can we in fact call ourselves magicians?"

Childermass is staring at her.

"What is it," says Norrell, feeling herself flush, "Are the words too difficult? If you can't keep up with this--"

"No," says Childermass, then bends her head and starts writing again without explanation.

Norrell clears her throat. "Beginning again with the last sentence. Moreover, if we rely on fairies to do all our magic for us, can we in fact call ourselves magicians? Surely to make another creature perform spells on our behalf is to be merely an employer of magicians. End memorandum."

Childermass puts the pen down. Her hands seem to shake a little, though Norrell cannot fathom why; is she nervous? When she passes the paper over, Norrell says "Your spelling in English is not good either, though your hand is well enough."

"I can learn," says Childermass, with sudden and surprising defiance. "Anything you want me to do, I can learn to do it. Even keeping a civil tongue in my head."

Norrell pushes the paper aside, taken aback. "I doubt _that_. However, you'll learn to spell soon enough."

"Aye," says Childermass. She seems to subside, or draw back inside of herself, with some effort. "I learn quickly."

Norrell supposes she probably does. She seems the type, with her too-quick mouth and her always-watching eyes. The problem will probably be to keep her from learning too much and leaving Norrell's house with all the money she has to hand and a few secrets for future blackmail.

"Will I be allowed to read the books?" says Childermass as if the answer doesn't matter to her at all.

Norrell looks at her. A disreputable girl with too many sharp edges; not what Norrell would have called the literary type. But of course, Norrell has not known her very long. "A few of the more innocuous ones, if you like. The histories, perhaps. Everyone should be educated about their own history." A soft curious curl of fellow-feeling makes her add, "You may read The Blue Book if you wish when I have no tasks for you, but you must not take it out of the library." There's no harm in Munday, after all; if more people read Munday than Norrell would worry much less about the state of magicians today.

"Aye," says Childermass again. "What do you want of me today?"

-

Childermass is, as promised, a quick learner. Norrell gives her dictation often at first, although she really needs it only rarely, then corrects her spelling. She has thus far never needed to be corrected on a word twice. Perhaps this is because she's also working her way through Norrell's drier magical histories at a rate astonishing in a creature who a month ago was picking pockets. As magical law and history are rather more easy to obtain than grimoires, Norrell's library has a preponderance of them that will have to be corrected later. Childermass has already made her way through Munday and through an entire volume of _Practices and Precedents of English Thaumaturgical Law._

"You must find it hard going," Norrell had said when she had began it. "There must be a great many unfamiliar words."

"I read around them," Childermass had said with a shade of defiance. Norrell had been expecting to offer something easier for Childermass to read, but the defiance struck her. It was so terribly familiar. Silently, she had fetched Johnson's Dictionary and a certain dictionary of legal terms from the lowest shelves, and put them on Childermass's little desk. Childermass had not said thank you; Norrell had not expected her to.

Now she's beginning the second volume. "I'm surprised at your interest," says Norrell as she watches Childermass take it up with due care. "Many people find law dry."

Childermass gives her half a scornful look. "It shows you what people were doing and thinking. It requires you to read around the edges, but it's still there."

Norrell wonders if Childermass will ever stop wrongfooting her. "I agree with you, but I had not thought to find a Yorkshire slattern so very attentive to the nuances."

"Even Yorkshire slatterns have brains," says Childermass.

Norrell doesn't feel able to disturb her reading for an hour or two after that. She switches to trying to conjure visions instead. It's an art she's been working on diligently because the Aureates seemed to do it as easily as breathing, but there's no way to make it precise or elegant. Magic should always be precise and elegant.

The woods around Hurtfew, Norrell decides. That's a target close enough she'll recognize it, but broad enough not to run into the triangulation problems.

It's rough going at first; the spell doesn't seem to want to go into the woods. It coasts around them, the view moving slowly, fading in and out. Norrell tries to steer it, but vision spells never seem to take to your will as well as some others do. It's as though they've got eyes of their own.

Perhaps she hasn't named the woods closely enough. A wood is, after all, a collection of trees, each with their own individual names. Norrell bites her lip and looks around the room.

"Fetch me the hawthorn branch from the cupboard in the corner," Norrell tells Childermass.

Childermass raises her eyebrows as if she thinks Norrell's gone daft and brings it. Norrell looks at it closely. It's dried out now -- she'd been using it as a handsel last week for an unsuccessful summoning spell -- but that's easy to correct...

She washes the branch in clean water from the jug by the silver basin, and murmurs the words. To her satisfaction, the spell takes effect immediately. The branch turns a warmer brown, instead of dried-out grey. After a moment, tiny buds start to sprout, then leaves unfurl. Tiny white flowers follow a moment later.

Behind her, Childermass makes a noise like a faint indrawn breath. Norrell is suddenly hyperaware of the fact that she's not gone to sit back down and read her book, but is, instead, about four feet behind Norrell's shoulder. Watching, presumably.

"I didn't require your presence," she says a little foolishly. Childermass gives this all the attention it deserves.

"That was magic," she says softly, reaching her hand out as if to touch the branch.

Norrell snatches it further away and puts it on the table, somehow afraid that Childermass's very touch will make it stop working. "Of course it was magic. I told you I've spent my life studying it."

"You didn't say you were a practical magician."

"I don't make a habit of it. The name of practical magic has been degraded by disreputable persons in yellow-curtained tents," says Norrell.

Childermass's eyes are still on the branch. "What was the spell supposed to do? Only bring the branch back to life? It felt...different..."

Can the Yorkshire slattern sense magic? Norrell tenses, but she's never been able to talk about magic with anyone at all before, much less someone who hasn't laughed at her for saying she studies magic. "My intent was to create a link with the parent tree. The blooming was a mere side effect; it is spring. The link will allow me to locate a particular entity much more precisely when I scry."

Childermass looks at the silver bowl. The vision of hedges bounding wounds is still there. Norrell takes the branch up and turns back to the table, feeling her own hands shaking just a little. Childermass just behind and beside her makes her tingle uncomfortable all up and down her back.

"I can't do it with you _hovering_ ," she says. Childermass moves back and away, over to her side where Norrell can just see her out of the corner of her eye.

Norrell touches the branch, and then the water. A smile spreads across her face as the viewpoint begins to move again, into the woods and onto a hawthorn tree even now in bloom with small white flowers. She hardly even notices as Childermass moves closer again. Just long enough, presumably, to see. Norrell holds herself so tightly still that she feels like stone until Childermass goes to sit back down.

The branch stays on the table as she sits back down to make her notes. Childermass keeps glancing up at it with the furtiveness the barn cats when Norrell passes one by on her daily walk.

In a low voice, without looking at Norrell or the table, Childermass says "It was beautiful."

Norrell wants to say that it's only magic, or that magic is not meant to be beautiful, or that she doesn't regard beauty, or that she didn't solicit Childermass's opinion and doesn't want it. But all of that is so untrue that she can't quite force it past her tongue. "Thank you," she says instead, in a voice so uncertain it hardly feels like hers.

-

Childermass seems to settle in well. She fulfills her duties quickly and efficiently, though she still watches when Norrell does magic and she hasn't fulfilled her promise to curb her tongue.

"You're not married," says Childermass as she braids back Norrell's hair one morning. "Why? You must be gone thirty, and gentlewomen wed early."

"That's a personal remark," says Norrell.

Childermass raises her eyebrows. "And?"

"What man would have me?" She lifts her chin to show the awkward nose and round cheeks, the small hidden eyes.

"A thousand a year would cloud any man's sight."

Insulted, Norrell says, "I have much more than a thousand a year!"

Childermass raises her eyebrows again.

"Well, I don't want a man who would marry me for my money; he would sell my library. Besides which, they all--" she stops herself. _They all think of me as a woman._ This is, of course, incoherent. She _is_ a woman.

Childermass finishes the braid and tucks it neatly under a cap without remarking on the unfinished sentence. It's taken an unaccountably long time; Norrell's nerves feel stretched. "You could find yourself an amiable gentleman with no money of his own."

"But I cannot marry." The thought of saying it out loud for the first time makes Norrell's hands shake, but saying it makes it real, and it needs to be real. "Even an amiable gentleman would prevent my ambition from coming to fruition."

"And what ambition is that?"

A plunge that feels like dropping into a hole, as Childermass finishes doing up the pins on Norrell's dress: "I want to bring back English magic."

Norrell expects Childermass to laugh at her. She doesn't. She looks at Norrell with her dark and knifelike gaze. "How do you plan to do that?"

"I don't know," says Norrell, dropping her eyes to escape Childermass's examination. "I don't know."

"Happen something will come to you," says Childermass.

For the first time, Norrell doesn't feel like Childermass is laughing behind her eyes at her. Somehow, the absence of mockery is more disconcerting than the alternative. "I know it's silly for a woman--"

"As to that," says Childermass evasively, "There are ways and means."

She doesn't explain herself, and Norrell hasn't quite got the courage to ask her about it yet. But before she leaves, she seems to pause by the door.

"What is it?" asks Norrell, nervousness making her snippy.

Childermass's tone is almost flat, as though she's holding onto it very tightly. "I've seen you do magic, miss. If you can show that to other people, the way you showed it to me, I don't think anything could stop you."

She's gone before Norrell can think of what to say, which is just as well, because she can't summon anything up.

-

Three months into her employment, Childermass comes into the library and says "I've finished the mending you wanted me to do. By the way, your steward is cheating you."

Norrell blinks rapidly. "Hemsworth? Certainly not. Mrs Gregory would have seen and stopped him."

"I suppose she's getting a cut," says Childermass, flipping carefully through the third volume of _Practices and Precedents_ to find her place. "I haven't gone to look, though."

Norrell takes her spectacles off and rubs the bridge of her nose. "Childermass. Assume I require you."

Childermass looks up. "What do you want me to do, go and sack her for you?"

"You don't have the authority to do that," says Norrell with weary patience. Sometimes she feels like having Childermass in her household is like trying to keep a ferret in a henhouse. A not quite tame ferret, one you're in the process of trying to tame, who cannot be convinced of the necessity of not alarming the chickens.

"It's your money," says Childermass with a shrug, returning to her book. "If you want to let them rob you blind, it's none of my business."

Norrell sighs. "Childermass. Why do you think Hemsworth is cheating me?"

Childermass says -- just a shade as though she's been caught out at something -- "You said it was my duty to do your personal accounts."

"Aye." Childermass keeps them very well, in fact, in admittedly much neater columns than Mrs Gregory or Hemsworth seem to bother with.

"I had to tally them up with the household ones, and Hemsworth--"

" _Mr_ Hemsworth to you."

Childermass rolls her eyes. "Your crooked stewart happened to be in, so I wanted to see whether they tallied."

"Why?"

Childermass appears to be at a loss to explain. "When you look at him you can see he's up to no good and he's pleased with himself over it. It's written all over his face."

The writing on faces has always been the one sort Norrell's not good at. "I shall take your word for it. How did you get his accounts?"

Childermass looks faintly shiftier. "He left them lying about when he went out to the orchard with Mrs Gregory."

"Did he?" says Norrell sternly.

"Yes," says Childermass. "I looked at them for a minute or two before he came back."

Norrell is almost certain she's lying, but also certain she won't be able to catch her at it. "I do inspect them, you know."

"Aye, but they're not easily read. Besides that, he has two sets."

A faint headache is starting at the very base of Norrell's neck. "That's simply practicality: one for him and one for me to reference."

"Well, they don't quite match. It's only a bit here and there, but it doesn't add up. I'm sure if you caught it he'd say it was an error, but..." Childermass shrugs. "They do spend a lot of time together."

"She's a married woman, Childermass."

Childermass gives her A Look. "That didn't stop Jezebel, miss."

"Jezebel was an idolatress, not an adulteress," says Norrell, with the doomed feeling of being hopelessly caught up in irrelevancies.

"Review the books yourself," says Childermass. "And pay _attention_ this time."

Norrell is so stung by this that she does it immediately for the exclusive purpose of proving Childermass wrong. The annoying thing, the incredibly frustrating thing, the wretched thing, is that _Childermass is right._

"How did you know that," she demands when she comes back into the library clutching both sets of books.

"I already told you," says Childermass, who has made several pages of progress in Volume 3 and appears entirely unconcerned with the upset she has thrown Norrell's household into _again_.

"If you're so very certain of your own conclusions, then perhaps you can interview replacement housekeepers for me," snaps Norrell.

"I can interview replacement stewards too if you like," says Childermass, flipping a page.

"You're a servant girl of some twenty years," says Norrell, sitting down in sheer exasperation. "You can't interview grown men for the position of steward."

"Nineteen."

"What?"

"I'm nineteen."

Norrell had been sure that Childermass was older than that; perhaps it's her air of worldliness or perhaps it's just her broken nose. "A nineteen-year-old servant girl can't interview grown men for the position of steward either."

"Why not?" Childermass leafs through Johnson's Dictionary in search of one word or another.

Norrell groans. She gives up trying to tame the weasel for the moment and lets it loose in the henhouse instead. "Go and tell Mrs Gregory and Hemsworth that they're sacked without a character. I give you the authority. _Temporarily_."

Childermass smiles a long, crooked smile.

-

To Norrell's own intense annoyance, she asks Childermass to sit in on both the interview processes with her. The even more annoying part about this is that Childermass does not react with any smugness. The absence once again feels more disconcerting than its presence; Norrell can't shake the feeling that Childermass is only concealing her laughter particularly well, rather than not laughing. There's something about Childermass that _implies_ laughing-at-you.

But she takes her job seriously, at least, dismissing various candidates with "thinks you're gullible" and "won't keep good records and a neat household" and "thinks too much of his own opinion." After the debacle, Norrell has decided to trust her opinion. She herself has never been the best judge of people, and if Childermass is wrong, well, employees can always be sacked.

And yet, somehow, she is not wrong. Norrell hires a Mr John Addington for steward and a Mrs Mary Langley (a widow this time) and the household continues to run smoothly. Childermass continues to check both sets of accounts when she tallies Norrell's personal expenses with the household ones. When Addington comes in to report to Norrell, Childermass always finds a way to be in the room, watching.

Norrell should reprimand her for this. It's not her place. The trouble is that it's so inexplicably comforting to have Childermass there. Norrell doesn't even know that Childermass is guarding her interests, she could be colluding with the steward she helped hire, and yet, and yet...

The household is running smoothly and the estates are bringing in more money and fewer tenant complaints. That is, after all, all that Norrell cares for.

That, and her library.

Her library, which is still not satisfactory.

"It's the trouble of the auctions," she complains to Childermass one day. "I have to go myself, and that requires me to interrupt my scholarship. To say nothing of trying to purchase from booksellers. They won't take me seriously."

"You need an agent," says Childermass.

"Aye, and who would I choose for that post? Who could I trust with the responsibility? He would need to be able to intimidate and know when to use the ability and when not to. He would need to be trustworthy with my money and my property, for no property is more dear to me than my books. He would need to be able to conduct business correspondence in my name..."

Norrell's eyes meet Childermass's over the desk. Childermass looks at her for only a moment, then returns to the letter she's writing for Norrell.

"Oh," says Norrell. "But you can't do it."

Childermass doesn't fake surprise very well. "I didn't say anything."

"You're a woman, and I'd need a man."

"There's ways and means," says Childermass, echoing earlier. "If you want me to do it, give me a chance. It'll be easier than hiring a new servant."

Norrell tuts on reflex, but the more she thinks about it the more sense it makes. Childermass has proven herself trustworthy, and she certainly has the trick of how and when and where to use intimidation. Perhaps slightly to Norrell's own detriment. She has respect for books; Norrell has watched her when she handles whatever she's reading. And if it was Norrell's money she wanted, she'd have blackmailed Mrs Gregory and Hemsworth into cutting her into their deal, not called it to Norrell's attention.

"We will go to Clifton," she says aloud, "There's to be an auction there in two weeks' time. I will teach you how to chuse books of magic and what to bid for them, and when the next sale comes, you will go alone."

Childermass doesn't smile; Norrell doesn't know why she expected her to. "And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime, we will go to York."

-

The trip to York is successful by any lights. Childermass succeeds in wheedling the booksellers out of everything Norrell wants, some very dear but of course that is to be expected. And at the auction, Childermass watches patiently, seeming to take in everything and hold it to herself. Soon Norrell feels comfortable sending her here and there to pick up, bargain, or otherwise collect various books for her.

Norrell keeps thinking about that soft _it's beautiful_.

And who else is there to discuss her ambition with?

"I want your opinion on something," Norrell tells her one morning when Childermass is helping her dress. Childermass, putting down a pin, nods for her to go on.

"Well, you see, I've thought of what you said. About the plan for bringing back magic."

Childermass's busy hands slow. "Yes."

"I thought perhaps some particularly impressive feat of magic, shewn to other magicians..."

Childermass considers. "You'll have to chuse the right magicians. And you'll need some sort of background work. A foundation, to make them aware of you in the first place."

"I know," says Norrell twisting her fingers. "Not easy for a woman."

"It would be easier for a man," agrees Childermass, almost a repetition and yet somehow not quite.

"I can't make myself into a man by force of will," says Norrell.

"I don't see why not. I've done it many a time when I had the need of it. How do you think I can manage going about and getting books for you?"

"You disguise yourself as a man to get my books?" Norrell scoffs. "How?"

"For me," says Childermass, buttoning cuff-buttons, "It's easy. I have a bit of a stubble that I stop shaving if I need to be particularly convincing. Some women do, you know. And I'm skinny. But most of the time, people don't look twice if you wear the right clothes."

Norrell remembers her nursemaid with the scratchy chin. "You...you wore men's clothes, and that was it?" The mental image of Childermass in an undistinguished grey suit and stockings with her hair in a queue...

Childermass kneels with effort and begins to put on Norrell's shoes. "That's all it was for me."

"That wouldn't work for _me_ ," says Norrell, looking doubtfully down at her own chest.

"With the right kind of corset you could manage," says Childermass, "I've known gentlemen with similar troubles to fall back on a similar design. A well-tailored waistcoat hides a multitude of sins."

Norrell feels dizzy, as if her ears want to ring and can't. _Gentlemen with similar troubles?_ "Are you suggesting that I--"

"I didn't suggest anything," says Childermass, finishes buckling the shoes and accepts a hand up from the floor. And she's right, she didn't. Norrell had jumped to that particular conclusion all by herself.

"But didn't it bother you, being seen as a man?" Norrell has the impression that women are supposed to _want_ to be women, though she doesn't know how it works.

"It is a matter of complete indifference to me how people see me." Childermass says this as if she means it, and this, too, Norrell envies her. "Would it bother you?"

Norrell shifts, sick to her stomach. She doesn't know how to explain to Childermass about the dreams. She looks at her hands and whispers a lie: "It wouldn't matter to me."

"Well then," says Childermass. She begins to put the hairbrushes away, and Norrell wonders how this became a settled matter, without a word being spoken beyond the hypothetical.

"But it won't work. It can't work." Norrell puts her palms flat on the dressing-table. "Too many people know me."

"It'll take time," acknowledges Childermass. "At least a year, I estimate."

"You have a plan." Awfully convenient, if Childermass had not been suggesting anything.

Childermass raises her eyebrows. "Of course I do. For now, let's start with the first step. You have a brother; he owns the house, although he doesn't live here, not least because most of the fortune was left to you and he resents it. Your uncle didn't like him because he was a magician, you see. What's his name?"

Norrell's stomach feels sicker, a nervous anticipation she's afraid to think about. "Gilbert," she says. "After my grandfather. His name is Gilbert."


	3. the practicalities of planning a death in the family

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am posting both the second full chapter and the interlude. The third chapter after the interlude is *probably* done, so next week's update should be roughly on time.

Norrell makes a carefully-scripted remark the very next day before she can rethink it, when Tabitha is bringing in breakfast: "I have asked my brother who lives in York to stay over Christmas, but I do not expect he will accept. He is very busy. Nevertheless, you might mention to the housekeeper to be prepared."

Tabitha looks a little frightened. Norrell usually only speaks to her when she's doing something wrong. "Yes, miss. Didn't know you had a brother, miss."

"He owns the house," says Norrell to her plate, "but he stays in York for scholarship. We are not close."

"I see," says Tabitha, whisking away a stray spoon which Norrell hadn't noticed. "I'll tell her, miss."

"Good."

Childermass comes to help her with her correspondence at half-past ten. "You'll have to be more subtle," she says as she opens the door to the library.

"What?" says Norrell, wrestling with a letter from an impertinent relative.

"The servants' hall is all a-flame with new gossip."

"I thought that was the point."

"The main concern of the gossip is why you've suddenly revealed personal information about yourself when you usually treat servants like enemy spies," says Childermass. "The consensus in the hall is that you're ill."

"It's none of their business," says Norrell.

"See?" says Childermass, sitting down in her usual chair.

Norrell sniffs. "I have done as you told me. Now, what is the rest of your plan?"

"Ah," says Childermass, leaning herself on the desk. It's as though she has no spine, Norrell sometimes thinks. "Very simple. You'll have to die."

Norrell stops halfway to reaching for another letter. "I beg your pardon?"

"You, Phyllis Norrell, must die, so that Gilbert Norrell can inherit your life. It must be done in a way that will allay suspicion on all fronts. The greatest problem, of course, is that you can't duplicate yourself."

Norrell frowns as a thought strikes her; Childermass, with her usual acuteness, notices and stops. "You have a way to do that?"

"Well... You're familiar, of course, with the concept of a changeling."

"You know how to create a changeling?"

Norrell feels a faint flusteredness rising in her at Childermass's surprised tone. "I know the theory. The practice has been lost for some four hundred years, and in any case it is largely fairy-magic."

"A changeling would die of natural causes in a few days, would it not?" says Childermass. "That would dispel suspicion entirely."

"Except suspicion that I had murdered my sister."

Childermass dismisses this. "Inevitable. And unprovable. That's part of why Gilbert owns the house: if you turned up dead and all your worldly goods left to him it's more motive."

"The money is motive enough," says Norrell, biting her fingers.

"If you owned none of it, there'd be questions about why you could spend it so freely." Childermass rubs her chin thoughtfully. "What happens to the changeling after it dies?"

"I do not know." Norrell rises and reaches for a history of fairy-kidnappings she's yet to find a use for before. "I should think it would be returned to the materials it was made of..."

"Wood."

"Traditionally, yes." She leafs through the book. "I do know a spell for animating stone statues."

Childermass shakes her head. "Not if you can't turn it to flesh while you're about it."

"Well, _yes_ , I'm not a fool, but you quite fail to understand my point." Norrell stands on her toes to reach another book; Childermass comes behind her and plucks it off the shelf for her. Childermass is tall behind her and so close that Norrell can just hear her soft breath. It does something strange to her thoughts, turns them into fog.

Childermass gives her the book. Their hands do not touch. "And that point is, miss?"

It's a moment before Norrell speaks. "You...you are familiar, of course, with Stokesey's Vitrification."

This earns Norrell another one of those looks she hasn't decoded yet; it seems to involve exasperation in no small degree, but also something else. "No, miss. You haven't told me about that one."

"It turns glass into living things. It doesn't work now. But I thought perhaps if I could find some way of a, a reverse process, which turns inanimate things into animate ones..."

"Wood isn't inanimate."

Norrell opens her mouth to say something scornful, but the annoying thing is that Childermass is right at least by Lanchester. She settles for a tone of impatience instead. "Yes. Of course. But that ought to make it easier, for it can have its -- mind changed. It can be convinced to hold a new shape."

Childermass tilts her head. "Is that what magic is, changing minds?"

"It's only a manner of speaking," says Norrell brusquely. "The point is that material can unquestionably be changed into another material, and that which does not speak and move can be made to do so. It's merely a matter of applying the right spells."

"Well," says Childermass, "That clears up that difficulty."

"But the servants will recognize me." Norrell puts Belasis down. She can feel frost creeping back into her heart; it had sounded so plausible while they had been talking of spells. "They'll know the sound of my voice and the look of my face. And there are records, records that say I don't have a brother, records that the house was left to me."

"Records," says Childermass, "can be changed. You leave that to me. Have you your uncle's will?"

Norrell nods. "It's with my papers. The non-magical ones. Very few people have seen it, for he had no other close relatives and the solicitor who wrote it is dead."

"Excellent. Then you give it me and I'll see a copy made that says what we want it to. As for the servants, we have a year at least. I'll go about the country, looking for better positions they can apply to. I will pretend I am doing it to revenge myself upon you with little inconveniences; folk will believe that readily enough. When your sister dies, you can send those that are left away with a few months' back pay and a character in the name of a fresh start. It will cost you--"

"That doesn't matter," says Norrell faster than she means to.

Childermass acknowledges it with a slow nod. "Then there is no difficulty at all. You leave the practicalities to me and get on with your magic."

-

 _The practicalities_ seem to take an agonizingly long time to begin. Norrell stalks around her library and tries to research changelings, regretting her lack of practical information on Faerie. Oh, for anything written by Martin Pale. Childermass's steadily-sharpening acquisition skills are not strong enough to deliver such a thing unto her yet.

Not that Childermass seems to be in any particular rush. She goes around talking to the servants all day as if she hasn't a care in the world, charming them with sarcasm and smiles when they're supposed to be working. Norrell resolves to pull her up on it when she comes in for the day's letters.

"I wish you'd spend less time in the company of the other servants and more time on the commission I have given you," Norrell tells her, fidgeting with a pen.

"It's for practical reasons. If I find what they are discontented with, it's much easier to locate positions that will tempt them away."

Dissatisfied, Norrell chooses a different thing to pick at. "You needn't _flirt_ with them so much."

Even less satisfying, Childermass doesn't deny it. "That has practical purpose too; it makes me look harmless and distracts from my true intent. Why, are you jealous?"

"Of course I'm not _jealous_ , I didn't hire you for your looks," snaps Norrell.

"Did you not?" says Childermass, with that little challenge of a sly smile on her lips.

Norrell looks at the floor and bites her lip, regretting her choice of words. "I don't make a habit of picking up strange women on the streets because I want them in my bed, no."

"And do you," says Childermass as if the answer doesn't matter to her at all, "want me in your bed?"

Norrell's impatience has dissipated under a flood of embarrassment; perhaps this is what Childermass's point in asking was. She tries an indignant response, or a scolding, or a misdirection: what comes out instead is driven by a terrible curiosity. "Can two women even do such a thing?"

Childermass gives her a look that suggests, without going so far as to imply, that she's being hopelessly naive. What she says, though, is "Are we two women?"

It's a question so patently unanswerable - the only possible response is either too obvious to give or a thousand words of things Norrell doesn't _have_ words for - that Norrell goes away without realizing that not only is she no longer angry, she hasn't answered the earlier question either.

It is a horrible and frightening thing to become suddenly aware of another person's physical presence. She thinks about Childermass: the thin slouching body and the burning eyes. And about the question: are _we_ two women? are we _two_ women? are we two _women_? Norrell doesn't know which it was.

It's a question justly applicable in Childermass's case. There's a certain careless disregard about her that makes her seem outside the boundaries of everything Norrell has ever learned. Neither male nor female, nor yet quite both or neither. Something that suggests she has seen all that manhood and womanhood has to offer, and has picked and chosen among them to suit her.

Childermass would never expect Norrell to play the part of a woman. And her hands would be gentle, not grasping, the way Norrell has always thought men's hands were supposed to be.

She wonders if Childermass would call her _sir_ in bed and for a moment her entire body feels white and hot and trembling. It frightens her so much that she won't think about it for the rest of the day.

-

Childermass is gone a very great deal, riding about the countryside in search of positions for servants and also changing records, or so she tells Norrell. Norrell trusts her to be competent in this. She doesn't ask how Childermass is doing it; she tries not to think about the fact that Childermass is often gone at night. Already the newly-altered will has been delivered. Norrell has not yet burned the original.

Her absence leaves a space into which Norrell's thoughts build. A space into which Childermass calls her _sir_. The thought makes her feel sick and dizzy, as if her self is spinning without her body moving at all. If she thinks about it for too long at once, it feels like she might do something irreversible.

She thinks about it at night once, in bed. Childermass in her bed saying _yes sir_ or even _no sir_. The faint challenging glint of Childermass's eyes in the dark, her hands just visible when they move, Childermass calling her Gilbert _oh god_ \--

"I don't want to do this," she tells Childermass the next day as Childermass dresses her. She's carefully not letting herself be distracted by those hands. "I can't do it. We have to stop it."

"Why?" Gown on. Norrell welcomes the brief distraction.

"It's...it's not safe. It won't be safe."

"No one cares enough about you to ask themselves any questions," says Childermass, which strikes Norrell as somewhat unkind. She bats her hands away and does her own front pins, as she sometimes does when another person's touch is unbearable; Childermass steps back and lets her.

"There's too many risks," she mumbles as she pins.

"We can minimize them."

 _We_ , thinks Norrell, and banishes that thought too. "If I am to do magic, I might become notorious. People will start digging."

"They won't be looking for evidence that you're a woman."

Norrell flinches. "And supposing they find it on accident?"

Childermass steps in to help Norrell on with the fichu. "They won't. Have faith in me."

Norrell's breath feels shaky as Childermass's hands pin the fichu around her. "I can't."

Shoes now. It's easier to talk to Childermass when there's no expectation that she'll look at her. Childermass says, "Were you wrong when you said it wouldn't bother you?"

"That isn't it." Too close for comfort. Norrell tries to think of something else, something that will make Childermass stop asking. "I won't be a convincing man. I don't know how to do it."

"It's not that difficult. We can practice--"

"No." The word comes out in a rush. Norrell must not practice if she wants not to do this. "Please, no."

"Tell me what it really is," says Childermass gently.

What it really is is: none of this is even about magic anymore. Norrell shakes her head and she whispers, "I'm frightened."

Childermass wraps a hand around her ankle as she slides one foot into a shoe. "There is nothing wrong with being frightened," she says. The hand feels warm and solid through her stocking even though the rest of the world is, at the moment, as insubstantial as mist.

Norrell takes a deep breath and tries to compose herself as Childermass buckles the shoes and levers herself up with difficulty, both hands on the bed. "Your legs are not well today, I take it."

"I'll survive," says Childermass. They have never directly talked about Childermass's oddities, but then, they don't talk about Norrell's. Childermass always looks as though she's daring Norrell to make something of it, as if she's just waiting for the opportunity to say 'what did you expect when you picked a slattern off the street'. Norrell won't give her that satisfaction. She only gives her a brief steadying hand.

Recovered, Childermass says again, "There is nothing wrong with being frightened. I will be here to help."

Norrell takes another deep breath. And, after all, her motivation isn't important. She can't bring back English magic the way she is now. But English magic must be brought back. Therefore, regardless of what she wants, this is a pragmatic act. It is what must be done.

It doesn't matter what she wants.

She burns the old will that very night.

-

Clothes are the next step. Childermass alleges to know a man in London who makes special stays designed for suppressing the bust, a very discreet tradesman who works on careful measurements alone. The cost is exorbitant, of course, but that doesn't matter. Norrell receives an instructional letter regarding where to have herself measured and how.

Of course, it must be Childermass who does the measurement. Who else is there to trust? They do it one morning when Childermass is helping her dress, Norrell in her shift and nothing else, cold and vulnerable in the freezing bedroom. Childermass's hands feel shockingly warm through the linen. Will that ever cease to trouble her?

"Arms up," murmurs Childermass, and "back straight," and all sorts of other similar practical instructions, and her touch is professional and reassuringly steady, and something awful and tugging is blooming in Norrell's stomach. If only Childermass would be less careful.

It will be a month until the corset will arrive. Meantime, Childermass also goes out to buy a good but secondhand suit in Norrell's slightly awkward sizes.

"I can't make do with one worn suit that doesn't fit me," says Norrell. "It won't be believed in a man of my means."

"Credit me with some foresight," says Childermass. "We'll have you fitted for a proper suit later, in York, where you'll pose as a gentleman who has just come into a little money. That will do; your sister keeps the purse-strings tight, remember. Once Gilbert moves in, he can expand his wardrobe and buy more things."

"And now?" Norrell's breath feels caught in her throat. _His wardrobe. He can buy things._

"We will have to wait for the stays to arrive. In the meantime, practice."

In the dead of night, once everyone else has gone to bed, Childermass gets on her men's clothes and makes Norrell wear hers. That first time, she stands in her bedroom, trying not to look at the unembroidered green waistcoat, the tan breeches. "Your suit is appalling," she tells Childermass.

"It's what I could afford," says Childermass. To call it a suit is to dignify it beyond justification; how had Childermass got anything done while wearing those rags?

"When we go to York, I shall buy you a suit too," says Norrell disapprovingly. "If you're to be my man of business, you must look businesslike."

Childermass shrugs. "Careful how you walk, miss. You've got no skirt to catch your legs against. Longer strides."

 _Miss_ feels faintly like the sting of a thorn against your skin as you pass through a thicket. How had she not noticed before, how loathsome a title that was? Walking in breeches and the plain shoes she's already half-accustomed to feels easy, easier than it ought, easier than is safe. Childermass's coaching is almost unnecessary, except in that she knows all the useful little mannerisms that she says will make Norrell's facade more realistic.

It is a facade, Norrell reminds herself. It _is_.

Norrell walks until her legs ache, and she doesn't ask Childermass to slow down or stop. This is for the sake of her magic and she _will_ endure pain and discomfort, if she has to dig it out from some other source. They stay out until Childermass begins to limp, and then Norrell says abruptly "I'm tired."

Childermass takes her by the arm and across the lawn, through the dark corridors, feet wet with night dew. The lateness of the hour and Norrell's own attire gives the episode a dreamy feeling. Although in her dreams, her suits are nicer.

"I'll help you get dressed for bed," Childermass whispers into her ear, and Norrell makes herself clutch her coat and keep herself still.

A little light in the bedroom is permissible, as Norrell often reads into the night. They stare at each other, Norrell awash in her own daring, Childermass with just a little less insouciance and a little more excitement than she usually has.

Norrell breaks the silence first, and whispers "It worked."

"I told you," says Childermass. "You see, miss, you'll have to trust me in future."

Norrell catches herself on the edge of saying _I already do_ and clears her throat. "Help me with these buttons, they're terribly fiddly."

Childermass's coolness returns, and with it a little smirk. She steps forward and begins on the waistcoat buttons as Norrell shrugs the coat off. Norrell holds out a sleeve and Childermass begins to unbutton the cuffs.

"Thank you," says Norrell to the floor.

"It's only buttons," says Childermass.

"Not for that."

Childermass looks up, and not smirks, but smiles. It's only the tiniest of expressions, and yet it strikes something terrible and powerful in Norrell's stomach. She looks away from Childermass, but she can't quite bear to pull her arm away.

"Miss?" says Childermass.

Norrell bites her lip.

"Ah," says Childermass, and she sounds almost amused. It's with fear that Norrell looks back up at her, but she has one eyebrow raised and that smile hasn't left her face. "I thought you didn't want me in your bed."

Norrell lacks the breath to say anything. She lowers her hands and tries to find words, and tries to look away from Childermass, tries anything, only Childermass is not running, she is coming closer.

Their lips meet with a shock that feels like silent thunder or invisible lightning in Norrell's head. This is Childermass, Childermass's lips and those hands Norrell is tormented by coming to rest on her waist. It's too much like one of her dreams.

Childermass lifts her head and looks at Norrell uncertainly, perhaps not quite sure of her reception. Norrell is not quite sure of Childermass's reception herself. But she won't find out without pursuing it.

"You could do that again," says Norrell, eyes wide.

"Yes, miss," says Childermass, leaning in.

"You could," Norrell whispers, half-gasping in her nervousness, half a fragment of a very old dream bright in her head, "You could call me sir instead. For practice."

Childermass's face changes, shutters just slightly, and she steps back a fraction. It's hardly a movement at all, but Norrell is so very attuned to her body right now that it's impossible to miss.

"Oh," says Norrell. Her ears are ringing. "I'm sorry--"

"I'm sorry," says Childermass at the same time, perhaps the only time either of them have ever apologized to each other. They pause and regard each other unhappily.

" _You_ kissed _me_ ," says Norrell.

"I know," says Childermass, and her mouth quirks in a smile that is not so much pleased as rueful. There is something pained about the way she is standing, and Norrell wishes she could understand what it was, and why it appeared so suddenly.

"Why did you do it if you--" Norrell bites the words off and takes a breath, fighting back an emotion that she knows isn't disappointment but she refuses to call hurt.

"I was curious," says Childermass. She sounds apologetic; Norrell hates her. Of course Childermass would not want to go to bed with a creature who is not a man and yet does not quite manage to be a woman. Of course Childermass would be normal, no matter how familiar she may seem to Norrell, no matter how much they have in common.

"I wish you had satisfied it some other way," she says, holding her voice tight.

Childermass looks on the edge of motion. "I stopped because I'm quite certain if I allowed us to go on, you would regret it later."

"I'm not a halfwit," says Norrell.

"You're vulnerable," says Childermass, matter-of-fact and distant. "You're frightened. And I will not be what you want."

It is too much work to tell Childermass not to make decisions for her, not to decide what is and is not what she wants. "Get out," she says wearily. "Leave me alone."

Childermass says "Yes sir" as she leaves, and Norrell hates her then more than she's ever hated anyone in her entire life, for giving her just enough of exactly what she'd wanted to hurt.

-

By the next morning, the incident seems to have disappeared into the midnight fog. Or at least, it seems to be so to Childermass. She arrives to help Norrell dress and gives no sign of what has passed between them. Therefore, Norrell refuses to do so either.

Time passes in changeling research. Childermass never calls her _sir_ , but does not call her _miss_ , a curious liberty that Norrell is glad to permit. Soon the undergarment arrives; it's rather like the jumps Norrell favors when she's not going to be seen by anyone else, but the cut is strange. Less padded around the hips and bust, looser and double-thick around the waist. She tries it on with Childermass's assistance over her shift.

"It's not very flattening at all," she says to her disappointingly lumpy reflection in the mirror. "Scarcely more than an ill-fitting pair of stays."

"You just try it on with your gentlemen's articles," says Childermass. "A well-cut waistcoat, remember, works wonders."

"This waistcoat isn't well-cut," says Norrell, but she submits to donning the suit.

She purses her lips as she gazes at herself, turns in profile, and finds herself admitting, "It's not so bad this way."

"With a waistcoat that _is_ well-cut, it'll be still better." Childermass steps back. "We can go to York any time you want. You're prepared now."

"My hair," says Norrell, touching it.

"Hide it under a wig until you can cut it. I will go and get you one first."

As if in a dream, Norrell feels herself nod. Her heartbeat feels slow and loud and painfully hard in her chest, though that must be her imagination, for surely she couldn't survive if this was so. In the mirror, despite his unfashionable hairstyle and his lack of neckcloth, is an unremarkable and unprepossessing specimen of a man in his thirties. She blinks, and he's gone.

She hadn't been able to bear to look at herself in the mirror in their earlier practices. She had known what would be there: a plain woman dressed like an abomination. That is not all she has seen.

She wishes the lines of her face were sharper, that her hairline was not so soft, that she had more jaw and darker hair on her chin, but for just that moment she saw past that. For one moment, she saw -- himself.

Childermass is saying something. She tears her eyes away from the mirror and her search for Gilbert Norrell. "What?"

"I asked if you wanted me help in putting your gown back on."

Norrell blinks rapidly and looks at the dark green gown laid out on the chair. Of course, she's in her shift beneath the suit, and anyroad she can't stay in this. "Yes. Yes, that would be fine."

-

Norrell starts out to York in a dull blue gown with the new flattening jumps and a shirt and breeches beneath it, a cloak draped carefully over the rest. Her hair is pulled back into a severely flat braided bun. When they arrive, she dismisses the coachmen, and she and Childermass duck into an alley. With shaking fingers she puts on her waistcoat, her coat, the shabby wig Childermass bought. She's glad she can't see herself in it; it doesn't fit properly. Childermass stands guard, leaning across the narrow entrance of the passage as if she hasn't a care in the world. Then they switch.

Norrell has a strange sense of the world rearranging itself when they emerge from the alley, one impoverished scholarly gentleman and one ratty street urchin with badly-queued hair.

"Don't explain too much," Childermass tells her as they walk along to the tailor's, "Only answer questions that are asked."

"I know," snaps Norrell, twisting her fingers together. "I know. What if he feels the jumps underneath my suit?"

"He'll think it's stays for smoothing your figure. Many gentlemen wear them."

"But what if he takes my wig off and sees my hair?"

"He won't."

Norrell bites her fingers and huddles beside Childermass as they come near the tailor's.

"Come in with me," says Norrell, glancing around.

"It's not respectable to bring your scruffy valet into a nice shop."

"As I'm buying you a suit too, I don't care."

Childermass scoffs. "My rags'll do me quite well."

"I insist upon making sure that you are dressed decently."

"If it will please you, sir."

Norrell almost stops her in tracks, then remembers that they are, in fact, in breeches, and Childermass could hardly call her miss. "Well, then," she says, off-balance.

Childermass gets measured for a quiet black suit, enduring it with a pointed patience that radiates 'I would rather be elsewhere'. When Norrell's turn comes, she finds herself holding her breath, sure she'll be discovered, but the tailor is mild and conversational and slightly distracted. She chooses fabric for one new suit, discusses a small legacy which enables her to chase these luxuries, and fidgets as tape is wound around her.

And then the linens at the linen-drapers, and stockings, and a pair of shoes which fits better. And then supper, and time to change back into her dress.

It feels like putting on an ill-fitting skin to pull it on and button it, to emerge from the alley as Miss Phyllis Norrell.

It is for magic, she tells herself. Only for magic.

-

The change is almost ready, if only Norrell could find a changeling. She spends days at a time shut in her library, coming out only for meals, neglecting letters and other research. And yet the mechanism by which a piece of wood can be animated continues to elude her. Months pass with hardly a moment's notice on her part.

The suit is lingering in her drawer. She and Childermass continue to go out and practice, but Childermass never helps her dress at night now. She withdraws to her own attic room and leaves Norrell to do herself up into a nightgown and retire to bed. Norrell wonders if she should say something, ask Childermass to stay, but what if Childermass thought...a bone-deep disgust sweeps through her at that thought. Norrell will not ever even seem to force herself upon a person who does not want her. It would be a disgusting parody of what she wanted.

Besides that, it gives her practice on dressing and undressing herself in these strange new clothes. Childermass will not always be here to help her, and if she is not, she must dress herself.

Norrell is getting rather good at doing up the great many buttons on her new clothes, although the jumps are difficult to lace on her own. She manages.

"It is a problem of animation," says Norrell to Childermass, gazing at the bookshelf. "I can make a natural material take my own form easily enough--"

"Easily?" says Childermass in disbelief.

"It's not complicated at all, only...unsavory." Norrell holds up her hand. "A drop or two of my own blood combined with a spell of transformation is sufficient."

"What form does a spell of transformation take?" says Childermass.

"Oh, it is very complicated, of course, but not so dissimilar to the first spell you saw me do. Only reversed: the branch took on the characteristics of the parent tree as an effect of being linked. For these purposes, I would link the two things -- myself and my double -- with the purpose of making the double take on my own characteristics." Norrell drums her fingers on the table. "Childermass, can you obtain for me some clay?"

"Not wood?"

"It is dust that man is made of, after all."

Childermass makes a contemplative noise. "Potter's clay?"

"Perhaps local mud would have a better effect. I am, after all, a creature of the soil hereabouts."

"Shaping is a difficulty with mud."

"Well," says Norrell, pleased that her exact point as been pounced upon, "I would not in fact have to do any of the shaping. If I put a great deal of mud into a vessel -- a coffin, say -- and I command it to shape itself to me, the mud itself will do the work. The difficulty, of course, is finding strong enough commands, but I believe that can be managed. Without, I think, the help of a fairy."

Childermass raises an eyebrow. "Could you summon a fairy? Could it do the work for you?"

"Not yet," says Norrell a little defiantly. "I have not got the right sort of books. And while such a creature could no doubt accomplish what I wish it to quite easily, the price would be beyond what I am willing to pay."

Childermass, who always seemed to understand about prices, nods. "Mud, then. Perhaps we should rethink the notion of a coffin. Folk may talk."

"But you see, it is the coffin that holds the significance," says Norrell, beginning to talk more quickly. "'From dust you came and to dust you shall return.' We must call upon the magical significance of the transformation of Man -- his genesis from the earth and his return to it upon his death. Half the work is already done for us if we choose such a form. It is far easier to convince mud to turn to a man if it is already placed as a man might be."

Childermass tilts her head. "Is that a part of magic? Calling on existing significances?"

"Well, certainly to some degree." Norrell rubs her hands together. "You must call upon Power, and Power respects symbolism. That was half the Raven King's genius, you know."

"You don't talk very much about the Raven King, for a northerner and a magician," says Childermass

Norrell wobbles on her axis a little."Get me a coffin and some mud. Some bog-mud, I should think, if there are any not too far away. Bogs are promising."

"Perhaps a mixture," suggests Childermass. "Some from the grounds of Hurtfew and some from the closest bog I can find. Where were you born?"

"York."

"Some earth from York, then, if I can find it."

Norrell is so pleased by this suggestion that it takes her until after Childermass's departure to realize that both of them had been using _we_ the whole time. And what, she wonders, are the implications of that?

-

The coffin, a bare-bones wooden affair, is delivered in the dead of night, a service which Norrell was prepared to pay extra for. The mud comes in here and there, nervous-looking diggers Childermass somehow knows bringing it in carts.

Childermass makes yet another trip to York in the following weeks - Norrell's starting to think she really ought to buy Childermass her very own horse -- and returns with two handfuls of dirt each in their own tiny oiled bag and a small chipped stone.

"What are these?" The stone looks familiar.

"Dirt from each of your parents' graves, and a piece of the house you were born in."

Norrell's breath rushes out. "How did you know?"

Childermass shrugs: of course, she changed all the records of Norrell's birth. "I thought it would be magically significant."

"You should have asked," says Norrell, but it doesn't have the bite she wants it to. She touches the earth from her parents' graves softly. She has never visited. They would hate what she is becoming.

The two handfuls of dust crown the top of the pile. The stone she buries deep deep in the dirt, a heart of sorts, with a drop of her own blood. Just above it she buries a mandrake root, well-watered again with her own blood.

"What's that for?" asks Childermass, watching like she expects an examination later.

"It's the solution, I hope, to the animation problem. I should have thought of it before, but whether or not it will work..." Norrell shakes her head. "We will bury this in the woods tonight tonight. It must be in the ground at moonrise."

Norrell wears her men's clothes for the exercise, and leaves one of her own shawls with the creature.

"How long will it stay in the ground?" says Childermass, shoveling the last spadeful of dirt over the coffin.

"Until the next full moon."

It's a very long and anxious month of waiting. Norrell returns to the study of Belasis by way of distraction -- the Instructions is one of the few truly magical texts she owns and she is certain it holds the key to a good many things -- but the charms of study are diminished by the suspense. Will the thing take root? Will it be sensate? Norrell has the mental image of a lump of earth transfigured into human shape but poorly, or of something with her exact face but no life.

When the month passes, they go digging at midnight again. When the shovel hits the coffin it makes a thunk that seems to resonate all through Norrell, as if it's her body being hit. Imagination, of course. Nonsense.

When the coffin opens, the piles of dirt are gone. In their place is a naked woman, pale and cold and lifeless, with Norrell's face.

"Oh," says Norrell. Is that what she looks like from the outside? So very frozen, and so very small? She hates seeing the body; without thinking, she reaches for the shawl and covers it. Her skin brushes against the shoulder and she shudders.

The white clawlike hand moves.

Norrell and Childermass stare at each other as the changeling slowly sits up. The red shawl draped around it looks dull brown in the moonlight. Bleached of colour, the thing looks grey, stonelike. Norrell backs away as it draws the shawl around itself.

"What is my name?" it says.

"Ph-Phyllis," whispers Norrell, her limbs cold and her neck hot, "Your name is Phyllis."

"We should get her some clothes," says Childermass, but though the suggestion is practical as ever even she keeps glancing at the thing -- at Phyllis.

"Come inside," says Norrell with her best imitation of briskness, "We must get you warm."

"I cannot be warm, magician," whispers Phyllis, "I am only earth. Return me."

"I will," promises Norrell, "Later. Please come inside. Quietly, you must not be heard."

Phyllis does not seem to understand him, but she speaks no more. Between Norrell and Childermass, they guide her inside towards Norrell's bed. She neither protests nor helps, which means that the two of them must dress her like a doll, pull the bedclothes over her. The skin is cold and stony too: it lacks the pliability, the comforting warmth, of human flesh.

The thing that has Norrell's name lays in bed, eyes shut. It does not move.

"You must go," says Childermass. "Now."

It takes Norrell a moment to realize Childermass is talking to her. "Go where?"

"Anywhere: an inn nearby, perhaps. Take a horse and your good suit. Anywhere far enough away that they will not recognize you, and that you will only arrive after dawn.

"I can't. I don't ride well, I haven't planned--"

"You've planned well enough, and you'll survive the ride. Now go."

Childermass packs the bag for Norrell as Norrell fetches several more shawls -- it had not occurred to her that she would need a greatcoat, and the night is cold. When dawn comes she will simply have to take them off.

In the days that follow, Norrell will barely remember the freezing ride to the inn, nor will she remember its name nor the name of the town it is in. The innkeeper barely glances at her when she asks for a room, even though it's only just past dawn. She gives him some money for it and as he doesn't correct her, it must not be too little.

The room is cramped and the bed flea-ridden, which would bother her in any other circumstance. But she's not going to sleep. She perches in the single chair pushed up against the wall and stares at nothing.

She did not bring any books with her. There hadn't been any time and besides, besides, besides, supposing the loss had been noticed? Supposing someone had found it in her bag when she -- he -- returned?

In a distant way, she notices that she is shivering. The shawls are in her one bag now, stuffed there hastily before entering, but she can't seem to make herself get up and get them. Besides, it's not really chill. It's the memory of her face, vacant and empty, the face of a woman who is and isn't her, laying in the earth, laying in her bed.

She wishes Childermass was here. Why isn't Childermass here? But of course Childermass could not come, Childermass has to fetch her.

The cold, cold touch of that stony skin.

Her own face with nothing behind it.

_Return me to the earth._


	4. interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second of the two chapters in this week's update because it's not REALLY a chapter, it's just a sort of punctuation.

On November 17, 1793, Miss Phyllis Norrell fell ill in the night. She had complained a little of feeling unwell for a day or two before, but no-one thought very much of it, for Miss Norrell was very often a little unwell, and complained of it each time. No-one expected to find her chilled and feverish the next morning.

Miss Norrell's maid was sent to find her a doctor and afterwards it was decided (no-one knew quite how) that her brother ought to be sent for too, as every-one feared the worst. A sudden fever was a thing that could not be trifled with. The maid, who claimed to know his address, went scandalously on horseback, but it was, after all, a sudden fever.

The brother, a Mr Gilbert Norrell whom none of the staff had ever seen, arrived the next night, with every sign of having ridden hard. This was very curious, for he did not seem the sort of man who rode hard often -- a soft, scholarly creature and small, very like his sister. The servants' hall said alternately that he must have loved her very much, or that he was very eager to reclaim the house that was, after all, properly his. But, said the other half of the servants' hall, if it was his why should he not just turn her out? To which the reply was that Miss Norrell must not give him much money, for look how he dressed.

Neither of these opinions seemed to make very much difference to Mr Gilbert Norrell. Nor did they make much difference to Miss Phyllis Norrell, who was rapidly declining. She had scarcely woken all day; when her brother came into the room she murmured _that is not my brother, my brother lives under the moss_. The closer he came, the more she insisted that he was not her brother, that her true and rightful brothers were the bogs and the hills and the stones. It must, was the opinion of the servants' hall, have been brain-fever, and no wonder with Miss Phyllis Norrell working herself so hard.

Mr Gilbert Norrell was seen to flee the room after Miss Phyllis Norrell said _return me to the earth, magician!_ It was, every-one agreed, very craven of him, though those who said it said it uneasily, with half-glances towards the bedroom where Miss Norrell slept.

Miss Norrell slipped into sleep and stayed there for another night. In the morning, the doctor found her dead. It must have happened early, he said, for her skin was very cold.

It was certainly true that her brother seemed disturbed. He ordered a funeral for her to be held as quickly as possible; Miss Norrell's maidservant helped him arrange it. It was not a well-attended service, for she had not been a woman with many friends. Mr Norrell sat through it with his eyes on the ground and his face fixed into an expression of composure that was not quite convincing.

Afterwards, he sent all the servants away on generous terms -- a fresh start, he said. There were so few left any more that it was hardly difficult at all. Any road up, no-one liked to keep living in a house where someone had taken ill so sudden and with so little explanation. It might be spreading.

Timothy the footman asked if Mr Norrell would sell the late Miss Norrell's library.

"No," he said, "I shall keep it."


	5. the hereafter and its consequences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic's done, so I'll probably be posting the last two chapters (the last "chapter" will just be a little epilogue I felt that the fic needed to tie it together, the sixth chapter will resolve the plot) on Sunday or so.
> 
> Please note that despite a lot of googling I genuinely have no idea how much a brace of pistols would have cost in the 1790s and I had to make what I believe is technically called a Wild Ass Guess so if you HAPPEN to have that information, please tell me.

Hurtfew is deathly quiet. Building the servants back up will be slow, Childermass tells him. Childermass has gone out in his -- her -- his men's clothes and found a maid-of-all-work and another housekeeper; with that, for now, they will be satisfied. It has only been a month, and Childermass assures him that people will come knocking soon, once the rumours of illness have gone.

Childermass, now, he's switched identities with no fuss and no anxiety. Norrell supposes that when you are in the habit of doing it, and when there is no-one who knows your face better than in passing, it's not so complicated.

The housekeeper's food is dreadful, but she claims to know many fine servants looking for work. Perhaps one of them will be a cook.

Norrell spends his days in the library, exactly as usual. Half the time he forgets that any change has been effected, and then the maid comes in with tea and calls him _sir_ , or he stands up and remembers the grip of the breeches around his legs. It feels too normal. There should be more adjustment.

The other half of the time, on the other hand, it feels faintly sinister and more than slightly surreal to be here, just as he always has been, under a new name. Phyllis is dead now, and yet he walks the halls of Hurtfew and sleeps in her bed, studies in her library. What right has he to live, when she has died? When he has killed her?

He reminds himself often that this is purely philosophical and that he does not care for philosophy. It's not his remit. He is here, and he did whatever was done for the sake of magic, not for the sake of his own desires. Whatever those are.

The silence of this moment is partly the result of the hour: it is nearly midnight and no-one is awake except for Norrell. Childermass has locked up and gone to bed, generally a sign that Norrell is up too late, but he's still certain that if he asks the right questions, he can get answers from Belasis. 

A faint scraping noise issues from the window, and Norrell frowns, glancing over. It's probably a bird, although they rarely come so close so late. A bat? He doesn't like bats. He ignores it with effort.

The candle burns lower. Norrell tries to tune out the scraping, but it gets louder and louder. Could it be a beggar? Norrell takes up the candle and ventures closer. The wards on the house ought to prevent it from being broken into, or the library at the very least. He pulls the curtain back and raises the candle.

Beyond the window-pane there is a cold grey face, a face like and yet unlike Norrell's, a face with dead blue eyes.

Norrell drops the candle and it goes out. But the moon is full, and he can still just see Phyllis, her long dull-brown hair loose and flapping in the wind. She's wearing the white shroud they buried her in, Norrell's old red shawl wrapped around her. In the moonlight it's the ugly rusty brown of dried blood. 

She speaks, and he ought not be able to hear her: yet he knows what she is saying, can read it in the slow deliberate movements of her lips. 

_Return me to the earth, magician._

"I did," he whispers, "I did, I buried you, I did--"

And yet here she is, and her clawlike hand reaches out to touch the window, as if to reach in and cradle his cheek. He scrabbles backwards and falls, his eyes frozen to the window, unable to tear himself away from the palm flat against the glass. 

He tells himself to get up, to shut the curtain, to recite some incantation which will turn her back into the clay she began as. But he cannot move. It's as if with her touch she's turned him to stone too. Could she break the glass?

For a long and horrible moment he is convinced that's what she means to do. She draws her hands back and strikes the glass, but it's only a tap. Three times. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Then, slowly, the hand draws down the glass, leaving a streak of brown clay. And then she is gone.

-

There is no sleep that night. He could have imagined it, but the fact remains that he is laying in Phyllis's bed and that if any trace of clay remains in it, it is beneath him. Could she tell where he is? Could she use it to find her way inside?

Only at dawn does Norrell fall into an uneasy doze. 

Childermass does not come to help him dress in the morning, as he often doesn't when he is too busy. Norrell isn't sure whether to regret this. Perhaps he imagined it last night, perhaps he worked himself into a fright over nothing. It's all the philosophizing he's been doing lately. He must banish such things from his mind, he must remind himself not to be mystical.

He eats breakfast with a little more composure. A nap at noon, yes, just a short one, and until then something quiet and difficult to mangle. That will minimize the disruption in routine. A bad night's sleep is nothing new, in any case.

When he pushes open the door to the library, his stomach flutters and lurches with the conviction that Phyllis will be standing there, but of course the room is just as ever, the books undisturbed, the curtain closed as his own shaking hand had left it last night. The book he dropped last night is still sitting on the floor, but that would have been purely his own upset. He clucks his tongue and places it back on the desk. That is what he will do: go through his notes again and add any necessary commentary.

Holding the notebook and the pen makes him quite peaceful at last. He sighs in contentment and begins to work.

Childermass, as is his wont, comes in around half past ten to see if he needs any thing. "If you don't," he adds, "I will go and see your steward, weather permitting."

"I thought it looked like it would be fine today," says Norrell, jotting down a note. "I have no need of any particular--" 

Childermass turns back to him and raises his eyebrows at the sudden pause, but Norrell is frozen. For Childermass had pulled back the curtain on the window to look at the sky, and on the window there is a dirty streak of clay.

"Sir?" says Childermass, turning back to the window. "It's only dirt. Some village children, no doubt."

Norrell tries to take a breath, and can only suck in a little air. His hands curl and uncurl uselessly as he reviews his memory of the previous night. Could it have been a child? A child would not have been able to get so close and would not have looked so very dead, so very cold. 

"Sir," says Childermass, coming closer. "What has disturbed you?"

After a few terrified moments, Norrell brings his tongue to speak and tells Childermass of last night's incident. Childermass's frown grows slowly more serious.

"Why did she not dissolve?" he says when Norrell is finished.

"Good god, man, do you think I know!" says Norrell, restraining a shriek though only just. "If I knew she wouldn't have come for me last night!"

Childermass gives him a look and sits down. "Calm yourself. You'll incite gossip."

Norrell takes a deep breath and rubs his hands together. "What are we to do? If she's seen wandering, they'll know I'm not dead. They'll know I'm not--" The sentence is unfinishable.

"Folk are more superstitious than that," says Childermass absently, "They'll think she's haunting you."

"They'll say I murdered her, then!"

Childermass hmms. "We obviously cannot allow the body to be disinterred. She won't be there, or if she is, it might be too apparent that she is..."

"Clay and mandrake root," says Norrell. "Yes, given the mark she's left on my window. Besides that, if rumours about the dead walking circulate, panic may ensue."

Childermass drums his fingers on the desk slowly: Tap. Tap. Tap. Norrell shivers a little. "If it gets about," he says slowly, "Tell them you were trying to bring her back."

"What," says Norrell, his heart pounding hard. 

"She was your beloved sister and despite the... _differences_ between you, your grief overcame you and you tried a ritual to bring her back."

"Have you a story for every thing?" says Norrell. His breath feels thin in his throat. "I can't tell them that I've done such unsavory magic. I don't know how to raise the dead..."

"Yet," says Childermass, looking up and smiling slyly, with that trick he has of suddenly looking sinister when one moment ago he had been only a man of business. "But they won't ask for a demonstration, after..." He nods at the mark on the window.

Norrell feels the cool wood of the desk under his hands, the hard chair against his back. His library smells, as it always does, of old leather. He is in the waking world.

"They may not even ask," Childermass adds. 

"I have to find out how to send her back," says Norrell, eyes on bookshelf, not seeing it.

Childermass shrugs. "It is easier to kill a thing than to bring it to life; you have done the first, and now you must only find the secret to the second."

-

The rest of the day passes in a dimly-lit whirl of research. Norrell rarely takes more than two books down at once unless he's working on something which absolutely requires comparison but today he pulls them off the shelves, grimly, one by one, all the books he used when trying to animate Phyllis. He sets them on the table in stacks, piles his notes from the project next to them. 

They had felt so full of hope and promise last time he had seen them, and now they are so sinister, sitting lined up and no matter how neat he makes them still radiating unease.

Closing his eyes, he pulls one set of notes from the top of the stack and holds it in his hand for a little while. There will be nothing in it that he has not seen before. He wrote these. He knows what they are.

By chance, he opens it to the bit about the mandrake. The thought of the little brown root growing inside Phyllis, bringing her to life, makes his skin crawl; he puts the paper face-down and pushes it aside, takes up another. Ah, this is more like it. The significance of the moon. Perhaps there will be something that tells him why she is here now, when it has been nearly a month since she died.

They had dug her up at full moon, of course...and it had been a full moon last night (shawl dark brown in the moonlight, small white hand, no no no). There must be some cycle. Magic often goes in cycles and so does the lunar month, that was why she had had to stay in the ground for so long. And thus perhaps every month she dies, and every month she is reborn...

For one night? For ever?

Norrell rubs his forehead. He does know how to find out, except living it.

He puts the notes away and stands to strengthen the house's wards. 

The new maid comes in with tea as he's working. He flinches as she set the tray down, and that makes her flinch too. Agnes, he thinks her name is or Enid, or some such thing. He doesn't ask.

"It's your tea, sir," she says, backing away. He wonders how he must look to her when she came upon him hands in the air and murmuring silent phrases. It will be all over the house that he does practical magic, and they will say he is a madman. Phyllis was never known to do practical magic.

He says "I can see that" in a snappish tone to cover the disconcerted feeling. That strange sense of disorientation. When he's alone, he's just as he always was, and then someone else comes in and makes him someone different. Agnes-or-Enid moves differently around Gilbert than she would have around Phyllis. She takes greater care not to meet his eyes as she leaves the tea. Is that because she's seen him doing practical magic, or because is now a man?

The tea doesn't soothe him. There's too much not to think about, and too much to do. He strengthens the wards, which takes a good hour or two -- it's easy to lose track -- and leaves him so tired he can barely stand. The rest of the day is spent leafing through pages and pages of notes and looking up references.

There is so much to do, but as the sky darkens and the supper hour approaches, he looks at the window fearfully.

Tonight he can work in his bedroom.

Perhaps he ought to strengthen the wards there, too.

-

Norrell had been certain he would not sleep that night, but last night's tension has caught up with him. For a tense half an hour he lays awake, waiting to hear tap-tap-tapping, but before it can come, he falls asleep.

He wakes around midnight, always a restless sleeper even at the best of times, which this is not. The moon is bright overhead: still almost full, only the barest sliver eaten off her shining side. Had he not closed the curtains?

Cold dread curdles into a ball in his stomach. He had, and yet the moon is streaming in behind him. He doesn't want to turn to the window and see what is there, but the knowledge is clawing the back of his neck. Each of his breaths feel too loud in his ears. The utter stillness of the room mocks him, and he knows what he will hear any moment now. The sound of dead fingers tapping on his window.

Moment by moment, time clicks forward. There is no tapping, and perhaps he only forgot to close the curtains after all. Perhaps the feeling of being watched is only him, his own mind attacking him.

He _must_ know.

Norrell pushes himself up on one elbow, sits up before he turns around. He doesn't want to see anything out of the corner of his eye. Hands clenched, he turns his face towards the widow.

The curtains are open, and there's a white face staring back at him.

She's not doing anything: she's not even moving. She is only standing beside the window, looking in.

Norrell feels himself freeze. He wants to call for Childermass, to order him to chase Phyllis away, but his throat is blocked. He wants to get up and rush at her, but he cannot do that, he could never do that. The glass separates them and she could do him no harm, no harm at all, and yet something about her horrible pale-blue eyes, so very, very like his own, fix him where he is.

She does not say: return me to the earth, magician. She does not have to. Her mousy hair is coming undone from its braid, tumbling over her shoulder. He had never worn his hair like that, it had always been neat. He seeks desperately for differences between them: the faint earth-stains on her hands, the deadness of her face. He has never been her.

And yet, in his heart, he knows that he was always her, that really she ought to be in the bed and he ought to be outside of the window, looking in. What has he ever been except Phyllis? How dare he try to be anything else?

He wants to rise, to plead with her: it was for magic. It is for the good of the nation. It is for the Raven King. To invoke the name of the Raven King even in his own head makes bitterness rise in him, but he knows in his heart it's true. And he knows, too, that none of this would make any difference to Phyllis. Phyllis has been forced to live when she did not want to, and he did not fulfill his promise to make her dead again.

It feels like hours that they sit there in tableaux, Phyllis watching him, Norrell frozen sat up in bed. But it's probably only a few minutes until she tilts her head, then looks up at the moon and slides silently away. The spell of fear transfixing Norrell vanishes. Like a child, he pulls the covers over his head. He doesn't want to see this room anymore, he doesn't want to keep looking, he doesn't want to see the once-friendly moonlight streaming in and dispelling the darkness. He wishes, for once in his life, for total blackness. How had she moved the curtains, when she had not been inside?

Oh, god. What is he afraid of? What could she do to him? She is shadow and earth and root, nothing to harm a creature of flesh and blood, and yet, and yet, and yet.

Morning finds him asleep after another long and weary vigil, the blankets still over his head to block out the world.

-

After two nights in a row of uneasy sleep and tension, Norrell finds it hard to remove himself from the bed. He's getting a headache, one of those that usually lasts all day, and the light makes it worse, so he decides he'll stay here.

Childermass, of course, thwarts this plan. Norrell sometimes thinks that Childermass exists only to thwart -- sometimes Norrell's plans, sometimes plans that work against Norrell. Having Childermass in your arsenal, Norrell thinks resentfully, is like having a sword that swiftly and reliably cuts through all the Gordian knots in the world, but is also prone to slipping and cutting your fingers off.

"Go away," says Norrell from beneath the blankets.

"You can't fight her if you just lay here," says Childermass.

"I have a headach," says Norrell.

Childermass clunks something down on the washing table, something that sloshes. 

"It's not your job to bring me tea," says Norrell.

"Your maid won't step foot in your bedroom, she's too frightened."

A curious thing, being a man, and having the role of inducing fear instead of admitting to it. "And what of me?" says Norrell, finally sticking his head out like a turtle peering out of a shell. "What of my fear? You don't respect that at all."

"No, I don't," says Childermass, thrusting a cup of tea towards Norrell.

Norrell takes the tea and turns away from Childermass, cross. Of course, now that he's cross, he has no room for fear, which is, he realizes, probably the whole reason Childermass is being so horrid. It makes him still crosser that the strategy is working.

"I do have a headach," he says, "and I'm very tired. She came back. I've barely had a wink of sleep since midnight."

"Tea'll help with both," says Childermass. 

"What the devil has you so motivated?"

Childermass glances at the door. "You've a visitor waiting."

"What?" says Norrell, nearly dropping his cup of tea. "Who?"

"Get dressed."

By this non-answer, Norrell understands that the news must be dire. Childermass helps him on with the stays, which still take some effort and time, and leaves him in privacy for the rest. Norrell hurries on his jacket, ties his neckcloth with fumbling fingers. This, too, he still doesn't understand. How is it that he could braid his own hair before he cut it off, and yet tying a neckcloth eludes him?

By the time he's finished, his headache has come on full strength. He steps out of his room and into the drawing-room, where any visitor will surely be waiting.

Sitting in a chair with a cup of tea and an awkward expression is a large man with lots of fair hair and the posture of someone not used to being indoors. After a moment, Norrell recognizes him. What's the surname? Todd?

"Jim Stott," says the man, rising. "I work your land, sir."

"Yes, of course," says Norrell, as if he's known all this the whole time. "If it's some trouble with rent, or the keeping of the land--"

"I wouldn't trouble you with that, sir," says Jim Stott, bobbing his head in a perfunctory way. Norrell interprets this as 'I wouldn't bother to talk to a landlord if I could avoid it'. People usually prefer to talk to Childermass. "Best if you sat down, I reckon."

Norrell doesn't like hearing this in his own house. "Why?"

"Bit of a shock for you, what I've got to say."

Norrell sits. He has a horrible feeling he knows what's coming. 

Jim Stott takes a sip of his tea, as if delaying the moment, and fidgets a little. "It's your sister, sir," he says finally.

Norrell feels lightheaded. "She is dead." Don't speak of her. Don't speak of her.

"Yes sir," says Jim Stott, and hesitates again. Any moment now, he's going to say, _only she's not really because she's you._ Norrell fixes his eyes on his hands. If that happens he'll make Childermass throw Jim Stott out. He will.

"You're a magician," says Jim Stott. "And so was your sister, was she not?"

Here it comes. Norrell forces as much bravado into his voice as he can muster. "What is your point, man?"

Jim Stott's nervousness must surely be proof: no one likes to accuse a gentleman of surely being a woman. Norrell waits. Everything he's worked so hard for is going to be snatched away. Any minute now.

Finally, Jim Stott speaks. He says: "I've seen your sister wandering the forests these past two nights."

Norrell blinks rapidly and takes a quick breath. He tries for surprise, and realizes he's getting it because he'd been afraid of so much worse. "That's impossible. I buried her myself."

"Well, as to that," says Jim Stott evasively. 

"Don't hedge."

"Magicians don't rest easy, do they?"

"My sister was a theoretical magician," says Norrell, twisting his hands over and over and over. "If theoretical magicians were unquiet in their graves, the country would be overrun."

"I heard rumours--"

"You were misinformed." Norrell stands. "I do not believe in spirits, nor in tales of the dead walking. Thank you for your report."

Jim Stott stands up too, his face troubled. "I know you'd rather feel she rested easy, but what I saw--"

"You can't have seen any such thing." Norrell won't look up. He can't meet the man's eyes. "I assure you as a magician myself, it's impossible."

Jim Stott's expression goes blank. It's as if he's decided warning Norrell will do no more good. "If you're sure of your safety, I will leave you in peace."

"Thank you," says Norrell, and doesn't see him out. He storms around until he finds Childermass, who turns out to be in the inconveniently distant dining-room, lecturing a footman about something. He catches Norrell's eye and dismisses the lad.

"Why didn't you tell me?" snaps Norrell.

"Because you'd have told me to send him away."

"Exactly!"

"I had already tried. He wasn't leaving until he saw you."

"I can't have my tenants spreading my business about to the world!"

"They're going to do that whether or not you see them," says Childermass, leaning against the wall. "They've been doing it all along."

"It's disgusting." Norrell rubs his hands down his face. "They're all wretched, useless gossips."

Childermass glances at the footman, who is not quite out the door. He puts himself between Norrell and the boy, one arm almost brushing Norrell's shoulder. Norrell hates how his breath quickens so close to Childermass, hates how he can smell the pipe smoke on Childermass's clothes. "They don't suspect anything, sir."

"If they're seeing her, they'll know--" says Norrell, and can't finish the sentence. They'll see the way that Phyllis's deep-set pale grey eyes are the same as Norrell's, the way the soft chin and angry mouth are Norrell's, that the expressions that cross their face are the same. "They'll know," he finishes.

"They're not looking for it."

"They can't help but notice."

"People see what they want to, sir."

Norrell rubs his forehead. "My head still aches."

"You go back to bed," says Childermass. "I'll deal with any of the rest."

"I haven't time," says Norrell.

-

The sun sets with no further progress. Norrell's headache has been too bad to permit serious thinking, and so has his fear. If she would only let him rest for five minutes, perhaps he could find the solution.

The headache keeps him from sleeping, insult to injury. He longs for the coolness of a pilow over his face, but then he might miss it, the moment when she comes. Even if the moon weren't bright, he's sure he'll hear the shuffling sound of her feet outside the window, or the gentle tap of her fingers. Every sense feels heightened to pain point. He's turned to the window, staring fixedly at it. Midnight passes and there is no Phyllis. Then the first hour, and then the second.

Perhaps she is gone. Perhaps this was her last gasp, a final haunting before she dissolved back into dirt. Perhaps she is even now mouldering in her grave, the red shawl the only thing left of her.

He hears something: a faint scuff, scuff behind him.

She can't be inside. The whole house is warded. For a moment he thinks he's fallen asleep without realizing and this is a nightmare, but he never has headaches in dreams, and thus the stabbing pain above his left eye is an unfortunate beacon of reality.

Something very soft and cold touches the back of his neck.

"You promised," she whispers into his ear.

Norrell turns over and looks her in the face; he can't stop himself any more than he could look away last time. Her hair is straggling over her shoulders, and her eyes have dark smudges beneath them that might be shadow or might be earth. He looks for any signs that she's dissolving, but the only thing he can find is the stains on her hands.

His mouth wants to form the words _go away_ or _I'm trying_ or _Childermass, help_ or anything, but all he can do is try to breath. The air seems cold and inhospitable, as if her very presence has corrupted it. 

She reaches out her hands and takes hold of his wrists. The touch of her hands wakes him up, unfreezes him, and he struggles against her. How is she so strong? Or is he so weak?

"You promised," she says again. "My brothers and my sisters call to me."

"I am trying," he says, "I am trying, I am trying, tell me _how--_ "

"You woke me. You must send me to sleep again."

Norrell tries to tear his grip away, and succeeds this time as she lets go and steps back.

"Return me," she says, and then, in the space of time between one terrified breath and another, she is gone.

He can't stay here. She's never come back before, but she's never been inside before. She could be in any corner, hiding in any shadow. He lights a candle with trembling hands and hurries from his bedroom. Library: not safe. Study: not safe. Where can't she get to? Where will he be protected?

His feet carry him to Childermass's room before he even realizes what he's doing.

The creaking of the steps up to the attic makes him wince, but he presses onward. Here, somehow, will be safe.

He pushes open the door. Childermass is already coming awake: his hair is braided loosely, the front spilling over his face. "Sir?" he says, sitting up and squinting.

Norrell holds up his hands. The wrists are dark with soil, in the shape of finger-marks. Childermass looks at them and then at Norrell with remarkable comprehension for someone who must have been asleep just five minutes ago.

"You'd better sit."

Norrell perches gingerly at the foot of the narrow bed, there not being a chair. He presses his hands together in an effort to make them stop shaking.

"How did she get in?" says Childermass, pushing his hair out of his face absently.

"I don't know," says Norrell. "The wards were up. But she is me. Perhaps magic cannot...tell the difference between us. At the moment." 

Childermass reaches out and takes Norrell's hand to examine a wrist. Norrell almost jerks back reflexively, but of course Childermass needs to know the scale of the problem. If only he would not hold Norrell's fingers with quite so much steady care. Childermass runs a finger along one of the marks. "It's the same sort of dirt," he says.

"Yes," says Norrell faintly.

"The doors were all locked."

"I don't understand it. I do not know what magic allows her to walk through walls. The wards, yes, I must adjust them, but the locks? They're solid iron."

Childermass makes a vague noise. He's still holding Norrell's hand. "Can you use this, this dirt, to reconfigure the wards?"

"Perhaps," says Norrell, rubbing his eyes. "Not without more sleep. Magic requires concentration."

"Well," says Childermass, throwing the covers off. "We're already awake. Let's go and make preparations for what _can_ be done."

"I'm not dressed," say Norrell feebly. "Nor are you."

Childermass gives him a scornful look and reaches for his suit. Norrell, ears burning, clatters to the stairs and waits on them. Childermass's hair is loose when he opens the door again. There's a bit of string clenched in his teeth.

"What are you still doing here?" he asks around it, reaching behind his head to catch up his hair into its queue. Norrell tries not to watch the skin of his wrists flash as he raises his hand, tries not to track the faint and scandalous hint of tattoo that peeks out from the sleeve, tries not to let his eyes follow Childermass's hair falling over his shoulders and into his eyes.

"I did not want to go back to my room alone," says Norrell in a small voice. "It's where she was."

Childermass sighs. "Come on, then."

They stop at in the study first, where Norrell has a supply of small jars for magical supplies. WIth a small clean ink-brush, Childermass takes Norrell's wrists and cleans the earth off into the jar. His brown hands are delicate with it, professional, as if he's used it before. Though probably not to this purpose. Norell stares at the brush and thinks very hard of nothing at all.

"There," says Childermass, closing the jar. "Go and have a wash now."

"Would you," says Norrell to the floor, "stand guard?"

When Norrell emerges, housecoated rather than dressed for company, Childermass says, "I should stay with you tonight."

"What?" says Norrell, starting off towards the library.

"If you're to re-ward the house, you'll need sleep, you told me. I'll stand guard."

"But then you won't sleep."

Childermass gives him a look. "You didn't think about that when you came to wake me up at--" he looks around for a clock--"What is it, gone two?"

"Half two," says Norrell guiltily. "What else was I supposed to do? She grabbed me!"

"I'm only saying you should be more consistent."

Norrell purses his lips. He doesn't want Childermass to watch him: what if he talks in his sleep? But he can't work on another night of Phyllis, and if he can't even go into his own bedroom to dress without someone to stand guard...

"Very well."

-

The day passes in that slow-fast haze that sleeplessness always seems to induce: every minute takes at least an hour, but hours pass in seconds. By the end of it, Norrell has the spell for the changing of the wards written out neatly to cast when he's capable of it, but not much more.

He and Childermass have agreed that an early bedtime would be best; Childermass has slept through dinner in preparation. But it is December, so by the time Norrell has eaten his dinner and mentally prepared himself to retire, it's dark out.

She won't be here yet. 

Norrell forces himself into his bedroom to undress before Childermass arrives.

He comes like a cat, slinking and casual.

"They didn't see you in the hallway, did they?" says Norrell, worried.

Childermass gives him a scornful look.

"I don't want gossip."

"I know that." Childermass sits down in a chair in the corner of the room and begins to whistle in an absentminded way.

"I won't have people thinking I bother servants," says Norrell. "There are already rumours enough in this house."

"You should be more worried about rumours of buggery than rumours of bothering servants, sir."

Norrell looks away, shock blinking through him. Another thing he has not truly internalized: intimacy with a man is now a different kind of dangerous than it used to be. But then, he's still thinking of himself and Childermass as two women and, therefore, a source of less suspicion. He wonders if he'll ever get used to the dozen little ways that people react to you differently when you take on a different name and a different set of clothes. What is now dangerous, and what is now newly safe. 

With a start, Norrell realizes the slow tune Childermass is whistling is Lyke Wake Dirge. This is too appropriate for comfort. _If meat or drink thou ne'er gav'st nane...every night and all...the fire will burn thee to the bare bane...and Christ receive thy saule._

"Must you?" he mutters. Childermass's whistling slowly dwindles away as Norrell blows the candle out.

Silence.

It's nowhere near midnight yet.

He ought to sleep, at least until he's interrupted. Childermass will keep him safe. The wards need to be updated. Research needs to be done. He needs as much rest as he can possibly get.

"Where is it you come from?" says Norrell into the air, in an effort to distract himself from the looming darkness. "Not York, your accent isn't right."

Childermass correctly interprets 'where' as 'what part of the county', and doesn't comment on the unexpected question. "I'm from everywhere, but mostly the East Riding." 

"Not Whitby?"

"My mother's from Whitby."

This explains most of it, although not the faint difference of the t's and k's and p's that Childermass gets when he's tired. Norrell wonders if Childermass would answer, if he asked. Only he doesn't care what the answer is. There's probably a very long and involved story, and Norrell has never been much interested in family histories.

Childermass doesn't ask him where he's from; Childermass doesn't have to. He's seen Norrell's childhood home. He's lifted stone from the path in front of it, seen the little step, the narrow windows, the neat rows of exactly identical houses it is terraced in. He probably knows that Norrell is the son of a woolseller and that Norrell's uncle owned a mill, which brought him his fortune. He knows that Norrell is a magician, that Norrell would do anything for magic, has helped Norrell do those things. He knows how old Norrell is, and some of the things that Norrell is afraid of. 

And what does Norrell know about Childermass? That he is from everywhere, mostly the East Riding, and that his mother is from Whitby, and that she taught him a spell for the picking of pockets. 

It makes Norrell feel an angry vulnerability to know that the knowledge is so one-sided. He wants to take all these things back from Childermass and put them in a box, bury them, make himself as much as enigma to Childermass as Childermass is to him. It does not occur to him to equalize the relationship by asking more about Childermass; that would open the door to still more vulnerability. And moreover, no doubt Childermass would in his turn hate to be exposed.

It is Norrell's private opinion that the greatest courtesy people can do for each other is never ask for any personal information at all, and he regrets the question he's just put forth. 

A sudden noise makes them both look up in alarm. But nothing follows. Perhaps it's only the house settling.

"You should try for some sleep," says Childermass, settling himself back into the chair in the corner of the room.

"I can't sleep with you here watching me," says Norrell, pinching his mouth up.

Childermass sighs. "I suppose I can go out into the corridor if this is too much for your sensibilities."

That will require Childermass to stand all night, which his legs can't bear, and of course he can't sit on the ground. If he took the chair out and sat in the hallway, Questions Would Be Asked. Norrell turns over without speaking and pulls the blankets up around his ears.

Silence.

If he falls asleep, Childermass will not mock him if he snores. Nor will Childermass tell him what he talked of in his sleep. They are still pretending the kiss never happened. If Childermass was truly interested in eroding Norrell's dignity or his privacy, that would be a very easy way to start.

Norrell wishes he hadn't thought of that. It's awfully easy to remember how Childermass's mouth felt on his, and to draw a line from Childermass's chair to the bed. 

In his head, he begins a list of things he must do tomorrow.

Look up the spell he used to cast the wards.

Look up how to use blood to ban someone from entering a house, if it can be done. He is sure it is possible. Whether it can be found in his library is another story.

Modify the spell so that the clay can be used instead.

Cast it again. Pay special attention to the outer boundaries and to the library and bedroom, since it is here that she favors.

Find the...

-

It's broad daylight when Norrell wakes - much later, in fact, that he can generally sleep. His eyes feel sticky and his limbs feel heavy, the way they will sometimes after a long nap that's been rudely interrupted. Childermass is nowhere to be seen.

Did Phyllis kidnap him? No. He would have to be out of the room before the others woke up.

Norrell, dressed and breakfasted, makes his way to the library. Childermass is there, doing accounts.

"You look very well-rested," says Norrell suspiciously.

"I had a nap after dawn." Childermass glances up at Norrell. "I suspected you might not be awake for some time yet."

"She didn't come."

"Perhaps," says Childermass with a crooked little smirk, "she thought it too hazardous with some other party in the room."

Norrell looks away. "She was alive for three nights. I suspect she's repeating the cycle."

"Well, that's good news." Childermass puts his pen down. "That means you've an entire month to decide what to do with her."

"Yes," says Norrell, rubbing his eyes and looking at his table full of notes.

"Well, then," says Childermass, as if this is settled and over with now. "What next, when Phyllis is dealt with?" 

"Childermass," says Norrell in exasperation, "I haven't even discovered how to lay her to rest yet."

"You will. And then you'll need a plan for the next part."

"Must you hurtle through everything at such speed?"

"Yes."

Norrell flounders. "Well, study, of course. And I must acquire many more books."

"And here I thought you were trying to establish yourself as a magician to others," says Childermass - careless and thereby somehow pointed in a way that Norrell doesn't understand how he achieves.

"I don't know enough magic and besides I must establish myself as a man for a good long time before I do _that_."

"You could get married," Childermass observes. "That is a good way for a gentleman to establish himself."

Norrell snorts. "Aye, and have my wife remove my breeches? She would sue me for divorce and rightly."

"Can't magic yourself up a different body?"

Norrell feels his breath desert him for a moment. "No. Magic does not work that way." _I've looked._

"Well, tell her you had an accident. No reason for her to remove your breeches if she thinks you're mangled beyond all repair."

"Charming," says Norrell. "I don't want to get married. It would inhibit my ambition."

"A wife will be more amiable to scholarship than a husband."

"I don't want a wife, Childermass, I don't _like_ women," says Norrell, exasperated. "I never have. They're uncomfortable to be around."

Childermass's faintly-teasing smile seems to freeze in his face for just a moment, then flickers away. "Of course you don't."

"I may be many things," says Norrell uncomfortably, "But I am not a tribade."

"Of course you're not, you're not a woman," says Childermass. 

Norrell looks away so Childermass won't see his face. "I suppose that makes me a sodomite." It's less disconcerting than he'd expected, when he'd lingered on the thought at night. Of course he ought to want to be normal. Of course he ought to.

"Are you well, Childermass?" Norrell adds, for Childermass looks faintly puzzled. Norrell had not thought Childermass the sort of fellow to be shocked.

"Well enough, sir," says Childermass, shaking himself a little. "I was only preoccupied."

"It does not disturb you to work for..."

Childermass rolls his eyes. "Consider my role in your life heretofore. What could possibly scandalize me? Besides that, it's only natural."

Disappointment crushes into Norrell. "Because I have the body of a woman, and thus the desires of one?"

"What? No. Because a great many men are sodomites and a great many women are tribades, and therefore I see no reason why you should not be."

"Oh," says Norrell. Are there a great many, really? He has never met any. "Are you one?"

A smile tilts across Childermass's face. "A sodomite, or a tribade?"

Norrell opens his mouth and closes it. This is still more difficult than _are we two women_. Childermass takes pity on him and says, with a wickedness Norrell suspects is teazing, "Perhaps I am both."

Norrell wants to tell him that he cannot possibly be both, but it is, of course, Childermass. Childermass, who seems to intentionally claim some sort of medial space, who neglects to chuse categories, who refuses to be bounded. Of course he would be both.

Which means there is still some...no. Norrell must not think of that now. Why did he begin on this topic? "I will decide what else to do," he says, "when she is dead."

With this ominous pronouncement in the air, he pulls his book towards himself. To work, perchance to survive this. 

-

Fixing the wards is much simpler when he's had enough sleep. He shakes the dirt onto a piece of paper, hands more steady now. He recites the spell, the exhortation to block this particular invader.

"Would that work with any one?" says Childermass, watching with interest.

"Not necessarily. I must be specific enough to keep the person out, which is easiest with hair or blood. A magician would be able to break the shield, I expect, and any human person might in any case be able to override the spell with enough effort of will. She, however, will fall to pieces if she tries, since she is made of magic."

"If it works."

And Norrell must wait a month to find out. "If it works, yes."

"Your present wards, they don't keep people out generally."

"They cause a sense of uneasiness and disorientation," says Norrell, rubbing his hands together. "That is generally enough to keep out that unscrupulous portion of society that has no regard for locks."

Childermass's mouth curves up into something that is not quite a smile. "Aside, of course, from me."

Norrell has always been willing to make exceptions to his principles for things he has a use for. He looks away from Childermass's mouth. "I wonder if she will be in her grave, by daylight."

Childermass stands. "Let's go and find out."

"What!" says Norrell, looking around. "But people will see! They'll know!"

"Visiting your sister's grave will do your reputation no harm."

"Digging down in it will!"

"We'll only go and see if the earth is disturbed."

"But," says Norrell, casting about for some other reason to protest, "But I must work."

"This will give you important data."

Norrell gives up: when Childermass has an idea fixed in his head it doesn't do any good to protest, although Norrell had made a habit of giving it his best. "Fetch my greatcoat, then."

The graveyard is on the other side of the village: a long walk, but not long enough for a coach. They set forth in silence.

This will be the first time that Norrell has been in the village since the Death.

"Childermass?" says Norrell, trudging through the grass.

"Yes, sir."

"What if they find out? What if they see me and then see her and note the similarities? Don't say they won't: what if they did?"

Childermass is silent for a long while. "We kill her, and then we put you in her place: we say you were not dead but only enchanted and that your scoundrel of a brother replaced you. He escapes..."

"I can't," says Norrell without thinking, "That won't work."

"Why not?"

"I can't be her again." He takes a breath and tries to calm down. Magic. It's for magic. For magic it might be better for him to be Phyllis again. He tries to force the thought into his head, but it feels like a heavy iron nail digging into his eye. He may not be able to survive as Gilbert, but the thought of dying in fifty years time, still the same person he went to all this trouble to stop being--

"Be easy," says Childermass. "You won't have to be. We'll spin another tale." He thinks for another long moment. "If they notice the similarities we shall simply say that you have a very strong family resemblance. If they ask too many questions -- well, what of it? You know the things that mark you as part of the family."

"But I know so many other things. Half of the time when I walk around Hurtfew, I am afraid someone will remark upon how well I know the halls. As well as she did. As well as my uncle did. And the villagers--" Norrell nods at the village coming up in the distance -- "supposing I know them too well?"

Childermass looks around, back at Hurtfew, down at Norrell, ahead to the village. "Given the amount of attention to pay to other human beings," he says dryly, "I doubt that'll be a problem."

Norrell is startled into a laugh, which is in and of itself an entirely separate source of startlement. No one makes him laugh.

"You've placed yourself well for this," says Childermass as they draw even with the village pub. "No one knows who you are."

"Yes," says Norrell quietly.

A few people nod to him. That is the most of it. Norrell tries to look down, so they won't see his face. Is that too suspicious? But he would have done that any way. He doesn't like people to look him in the face.

The grave is neat and tidy and undisturbed. Grass has not begin to grow over it yet; perhaps that is a sign. Norrell tries to cast his memory back to all the folktales about the dead walking he's ever heard. But then, Phyllis was never really alive.

"I'll come back," says Childermass, quiet enough not to be overheard. "Tonight, to dig."

-

Norrell knows he ought to sleep, but it's hard not to wait up, anxiously, for Childermass to return from his errand. Suppose Childermass is arrested for grave-robbing? In fact he is still in his study, reading a book on protection and conjuration, when he hears the sound of the door.

When Childermass enters, he looks weary and bogged down by dirt. He says heavily, "She's not there."

"Ah." Norrell stares at the book in front of him. "So anything which would require dealing with her corpse at this moment will not work."

"Could you find her? In your bowl?"

Norrell sighs. "Scrying is an entirely imprecise art and I have by no means perfected it; half the time the water will not even show me a picture. Wards are much easier to be precise with."

Childermass taps his fingers on the desk. "Give me some money."

"How much?" says Norrell.

"Three pounds."

"Childermass!"

"It's for a brace of pistols."

"It won't work," says Norrell. He sets off towards his bedroom where the strong-box is kept. "If she could be killed by conventional weapons I should imagine she would not be alive in the first place. She has no heart."

"We'll see," says Childermass. "I'll go into town tomorrow."

"And how are you going to find her?"

"I'm not," says Childermass. "This is in case you can't stop her in time. If she comes back, I want to be ready."

-

The month passes all too quickly. Norrell spends it researching spells of banishment, dissolution, destruction, and silencing. There's just not enough information about any of the procedures for him to be sure that any of them are right.

He casts them anyway, each time using one or two grains of the dirt she left.

"If you cast one and it works," says Childermass, watching like a hawk, "Will you know?"

"I shall probably feel it take, but there is always a chance I will not."

"So you can't be sure she'll come back or not."

Norrell shakes his head. "I really do not know how I managed to animate her in the first place. It's as though she was made by stronger magic than I have the ability to produce."

"You called upon too many existing significances," says Childermass. "You said she would fall to pieces if she came into the wards. Could you leverage that effect? Create a...ward around her, and then take the magic away?"

"She would have to enter it willingly. Moreover, I do not know that I could create one in such a small space.

"What if you lowered them and then put them back up again?"

Norrell looks at him severely. "That would take days. The process is not a rapid one. I can't just dismiss them with a wave of my hand. Don't be foolish."

"I could be less foolish if I understood more."

Norrell flaps a hand irritably. "The wards work as well as they do because a house is a stronghold - a place that is already, in some way, held together. Much like a town, or a nation, or even a forest. One can reify the imaginary boundaries, slowly and with effort, to create a sense of--connectedness in such a place, and that will serve to dissuade intruders. But unless I could drive her through the door -- and we cannot find her -- I could not use that effect to destroy her."

"Maybe she'll take the hint and do it herself," murmurs Childermass.

"We cannot count on that." Norrell rubs his forehead. "This is my punishment for straying off the path of Known Magic. I made this spell from my own knowledge, and it has come back to haunt me because that knowledge was incomplete. You see why I cannot yet reveal myself as a magician."

"And yet," says Childermass, "you did it, and did it successfully."

Norrell looks down at his own hands. For magic, yes. And had he done it for magic? Or had he done it because of the dreams he's been having since he was small? If he is honest, he has always known himself to be some breed of degenerate. She has always known herself...

He pinches his fingers tightly together and takes a deep breath. 

This is why looking Phyllis in the eye frightens him so much: because it is only by her death that Gilbert can become real.


	6. the resolution of local disturbances

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sincerely hope this is satisfying, I have lost my ability to judge it objectively after so much writing on it.

Tonight: the full moon. Norrell's sequence of spell after spell after spell has not felt like anything took, but there is no way to know. He has experimented with the creation of room-sized wards and wards that can be raised instantly to no avail. He has consulted all the books in his accursedly meager library, and none of them have had any effect, save to tell him that he is far beyond his depth.

It seems a long time until the hour when Childermass is set to turn up and take the same seat in the chair in the corner of the room. They had hardly needed to discuss the necessity of a guard, this time.

There is not quite enough light cast by the single candle. Norrell draws himself closer to the center of the bed, waiting.

Childermass seems more than usually shadowed when he comes in. He has the pistols in their little case with him, and he puts them down on the floor before he sits.

"I would be more concerned about you shooting your own foot off than heartened that you would do any damage to her," says Norrell to the bedsheets, crossly.

"I know how to shoot," says Childermass.

Norrell harrumphs and draws the candle closer to himself.

A jolting sound comes from the window.

Norrell jerks his hand and drops the candle onto the sheets.

For a few crowded seconds, the world seems full of motion. Norrell rolls back from the spot, and Childermass jerks himself out of the chair and smothers the flame with the pillow in an instant. The fire is gone so quickly that Norrell scarcely has time to react, but his hands are beginning to shake as he rights the candle and puts it carefully down on the floor. No more light tonight, except the moon.

"Daft beggar," says Childermass, putting the pillow back on the bed.

"I didn't do it on purpose! I thought I heard her at the window!"

"It was only a bat. Tha's got wax on thy cheek," says Childermass, reaching out to wipe it away.

Norrell, startled by the pronoun shift, looks up at just the wrong moment and is frozen for once by something not at all like fear.

Childermass must see it, for some quality in his face changes. That quick and silent face, so often shut, has fallen a little open around the eyes.

Norrell feels the moment the touch becomes becomes deliberate: like dropping a curtain down over a window. Childermass's hand cups Norrell's cheek. His long, thin fingers against Norrell's jaw, the thumb just brushing the cheekbone. They're a little cold. The sensation feels as though it's going to be imprinted on Norrell for a long time to come; his hands clench tightly in his lap.

Childermass for once seems robbed of speech or thought or motion. Norrell is trying not to look at his eyes, and it is doing exactly as much good as his previous attempts to move. He is aware of his breathing quickening. He wonders if Childermass can tell and if the way Childermass's mouth has opened just a little means the same thing.

They must look silly, two men standing there and looking at each other. Looking at nothing, except each other.

Childermass's voice when he speaks is raw, a little rough. "Ask me."

The sting of that reminder curdles the moment, and Norrell's shoulders loosen in disappointment, anticipation gone. "It didn't do me very much good during your last experiment," he says, bitterness seeping into the spaces between the words.

Childermass blinks a little, as if a spell has broken. "Experiment?"

He does not even remember. Norrell, imagining he can feel his own temperature rising with the immensity of his anger, with the way Childermass's hand feels against his cheek, says "You kissed me last time and then you said it was mere curiosity--"

"Ah," says Childermass. "That. I remember kissing you _very_ well, I'd forgotten my own lie."

"Lie! What lie?"

Childermass shrugs. "Had to tell you something. When you asked me to call you sir I thought you were going to ask me to play the part of your maidservant and I wasn't minded to do that."

"And now you are?" says Norrell. The entire world feels like it's rearranging itself in his head, things turning upside down right when he'd thought them settled. There are questions he wants to asked, but they're being overwhelmed by the sheer physicality of the moment.

"That is not," says Childermass, his finger just brushing Norrell's lip, "the part I intend to play. Will you ask me?"

There is too much to be asked. There is too much chance of ruining the precious illusion that Childermass is only kissing him, is only allowed to kiss him, because it is the most convenient option for both of them. "Please," says Norrell, perhaps the first time he's ever said that to Childermass and certainly the most sincere, "Please, I--"

"Yes, sir," breathes Childermass.

The soft bump of their noses against each other, Childermass's breath against his mouth. It's as though this is something Childermass has wanted to do for a very long time. Norrell longs to push Childermass away, to snap at him to stop, but he longs much more for Childermass to keep on. The fingers against his face curl a little, cup his cheek, pull him just that much closer. The softest touch of lips against his.

He wishes Childermass would be less careful.

The reverent way Childermass presses into the kiss, as if he doesn't want to frighten Norrell. Norrell leans forward carefully, in an attempt to signal that he is not delicate. He wants Childermass to make this stop feeling like it matters.

Childermass kisses like he has all the time in the world.

Norrell's own hand comes up to touch the loose locks of hair that always hang in Childermass's face, the broken nose he's seen so many times. A complicated look flits across Childermass's face and then is banished, and he kisses him again. Hungrier this time, with more intent. Norrell prefers to think of it as predatory rather than desperate because that makes it matter less.

Something about the kisses robs him of breath, fills him with something awful and aching and soft. Oh no, he thinks, uncurling his other hand and placing it tentatively on Childermass's thigh. Oh no.

Childermass's teeth just catch at his lip, and Norrell shivers, digs his hand into Childermass's leg. They pull back from each other, and the soft sound of their breathing in time seems to fill the room.

Somehow, this is too intimate. Norrell throws himself into another kiss, and Childermass takes it, grips his shoulders, presses him down on the bed with more gentleness than Norrell wants. There's an awkward little moment where he almost falls on top of Norrell, and they both almost laugh, and that awful aching feeling seems to fill Norrell for a moment before he banishes it.

On their sides finally they kiss again, coasting toward some destination Norrell doesn't quite know. Childermass's hand glides down his back, down to the small of it, pressing him close. Another nip, harder this time, that tingles all through Norrell. He remembers _are we two women_ and the look Childermass had given him. He--

From the window: THUD. THUD. THUD.

The jolt of the sudden noise causes a whole-body flinch in both of them. Norrell looks up at Childermass.

"Is she there?" he whispers.

"Don't look at her," says Childermass.

Norrell puts his face in Childermass's shirt. It feels as though every time Phyllis appears, she reduces him again to a child, too frightened to do anything except hide. Absurdly, Childermass holds him. Throughout the whole episode -- half an hour at the least, although Norrell quickly loses track of time -- Childermass holds him.

That is wrong; Childermass is meant to be indifferent, cold, untouchable. But that has generally been what Childermass ought to be and what he appears to be rather than, strictly speaking, all Childermass is. His touch has always, always been gentle. Norrell suspects there is much more to him than has hitherto unfolded, and refuses to let himself wonder what it is.

Gradually, the banging stops. But Childermass doesn't move to kiss him again, or pull himself away. Perhaps he can feel Norrell's shaking. Without speaking, without agreement, they lay that way until finally Norrell falls asleep.

-

Childermass, of course, has gone by the time dawn breaks. Norrell doesn't see him until some hours later, when he comes in only briefly to drop a new book on Norrell's desk after the arrival of the post. It's a medieval manual on the magical significance of the human body. Not a book of magic, but Norrell is growing desperate.

He takes it into the bedroom when night falls and continues reading until Childermass turns up.

"You've been away a good deal today," says Norrell when he comes in.

"The estate needs seeing to, even when you're trying to finish a mercy killing." Childermass sits down in his usual chair. "Any luck on the book?"

"No. The difficulty, of course, is that she does not have a human body. I imagine if we cut her open, we would find only solid clay. Or perhaps parts of a mandrake-root."

How does one ask someone: please come over here and kiss me again? Norrell eyes Childermass, but he seems distracted.

It's no good sleeping until she's come and gone. Norrell reaches for the book and his notes and his pencil and slowly begins to make notes on the elemental connections of the liver, lungs, and heart, in case it helps. In the chair, Childermass looks half-asleep. Perhaps he didn't rest this morning, before Norrell's waking.

At the usual hour of midnight, a clatter and bang comes. Norrell manages not to catch the bed on fire again, although perhaps if he did, Childermass would come over and kiss him. Or perhaps that was a momentary fluke. Or perhaps Childermass is waiting for a more propitious time, one without any ghosts in it.

At the window, Phyllis is wailing, a long sorrowful sound that digs claws into Norrell's sides. He curls into a ball and puts his hands over his ears. Childermass, in the chair, is hunched over. For a moment one of his hands reaches out -- to Norrell? To the window?

Norrell wishes he'd come back over, the way he had last night. But of course they must not speak of that. Of course they mustn't. Of course Norrell must not long for the comfort of someone's arms around him, of a chest to hide his face against. He is a man now, after all. Men are not meant to need such things. He had never thought that would be a difficult thing to achieve, before.

Childermass stands.

For a heart-thumping moment Norrell thinks Childermass has read his mind and is coming over; for another he thinks Childermass is going to chide him for his weakness.

But instead he reaches for the brace of pistols by the chair and begins to check them methodically.

"It won't work," Norrell reminds him.

"Might scare her off."

"It might not be safe," says Norrell, "What if she hurts you?"

Childermass gives him a little smile. "You've enough worrying to do on your own account without worrying for me too."

Norrell rolls upright and watches the window fixedly. Phyllis's hair hangs down in her face, so he can hardly see her eyes now. The sound of Childermass's footsteps fade. What if Phyllis kills Childermass? What will Norrell do then? He'll have no defense, no one to help him with the little things of being a man, no one to go about getting books for him, no one to...

The wailing stops.

For a moment, hope rises in Norrell's chest. But there was no gunfire, nothing to suggest an altercation. He sits with his arms around himself, frozen, until he heard the slow heavy irregular thud of Childermass's footsteps in the corridor.

"Wasn't there, either," says Childermass. "She has a talent for that."

"I suppose sending you to chase her away three nights out of every twenty-eight indefinitely is impractical," says Norrell into the covers.

"It would cause talk," Childermass agrees. "I do not believe she'll be back."

"Will you," said Norrell, steadily not looking up, "stay with me?"

Childermass seems about to say something, from the indrawn breath. A pause. "Of course, sir."

"If you have more important duties, of course--"

"You do pay me," says Childermass, sitting himself back down in the chair. "If I wish to continue to be paid, it would be wisest not to let you be killed."

And yet, thinks Norrell, and yet -- this was not what Childermass had been going to say, he is sure. "You countermand my orders often enough."

"For your own good," says Childermass with a mysterious smile. "Go to sleep, sir."

"You are very high-handed for someone who claims to care for his pay so very much."

The smile broadens, but Childermass does not speak. Norrell harrumphs and lays his head down.

It is really very silly for Childermass to sit in a hard chair all night, when just twenty-four hours ago he was in Norrell's bed. His hands wandering down Norrell's back, his mouths warm against Norrell's. Of all the liberties --

Norrell closes his eyes. He will think of nothing.

But he drifts to sleep with the sense-memory of Childermass's body against his own despite his best effort.

-

The next morning is too disturbed for him to worry about matters of the heart. He's greeted before breakfast with the worried face of the housekeeper.

"Sir," she says, squaring her shoulders firmly, "We've a complaint to make."

They've discovered him. They are going to object to living in the same house as a creature like him. "Yes?" he says, forcing impatience into his voice.

"There was wailing outside the house last night."

The world spins on its axis as Norrell tries to readjust to the new source of worry. Equally stressful. "Yes?" he ventures. "I did not hear it."

"I don't see how you could have missed it. It was loud enough to wake the dead."

Norrell clutches the table. "I expect it was merely an animal."

"It didn't sound like an animal, sir. Some of the girls, they think the house is haunted."

"Ridiculous," says Norrell. "Ghosts aren't real."

"That's what I told them, but they said you were a magician, and couldn't magical things come and haunt you?"

"Ridiculous," says Norrell again feebly.

The housekeeper nods. "So I tried to tell them, aye. But they begged me, sir, begged me to ask you to do something to make it stop. It frightened the life out of them."

"Girls have a way of dramatizing themselves," says Norrell. A little of Phyllis snarls inside his head, but he ignores it.

"Well, perhaps that's so, sir, but they were scared stiff. It's not good for their work, not to sleep. Could you.." She waves. "Do some sort of ritual?"

Norrell sighs. "I will do what I can, but the house is already protected. Not that there's anything to protect from. Do tell them that."

She nods and bows.

If the servants are going to be poking around, he will have to move faster. If only he were a little better at creative thinking.

Norrell goes for a walk to clear his head. This rarely works, but his uncle had always done it, so it's become something of a habit at dire moments. Cold rain begins to fall on his shoulders as walks. He stops to scowl at the sky.

A scrubby copse of trees up ahead promises shelter. With a sigh, he trudges into it and huddles unde the one with the thickest branches.

Now this is like nothing so much as being fourteen again. How had he...? Ah, yes.

"I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome into my heart."

There's nothing, of course. That's as expected now. A burst of anger makes him add, "None of this would be happening if you'd taken my invitation in the first place. I begged you for so many years, but did you come? No."

All those years he...she? She had spent begging to be transformed. Made right. What an awful waste.

The caw of a raven startles him badly, and he gets up and hurries back out into the rain.

Heart, he thinks on his way back. Hmm.

-

"I've been thinking," says Childermass the next day, "She can't get in the house now, and she can only bother you on the ground floor."

"That seems to be the case, certainly."

"Supposing for a change you came and sat in my room over night? At least til she's gone. You'd have to be out before dawn, but I wake up often and I can send you off easily."

Norrell frowns. "Y-es," he says slowly. "I believe that would be wise, if you feel confident in it as a solution."

"A temporary one, at least."

Norrell looks at the page he has open: the astrological meanings of various body parts. It has thus far been unenlightening. "We really must finish this soon. The servants have begun to talk."

"Servants always talk," says Childermass. "I should know: I am one."

Norrell dismisses this with a wave. "What do you know of revenants?"

"Ah," says Childermass, "We're changing approaches. Cutting off the head, burning the body, or destroying the heart is generally indicated. But you seem to think those won't work."

"Shooting her won't, certainly. She has no blood and no organs. And of course cutting off the head will do no good, for it is not her head that keeps her mobile."

"What does keep her mobile?"

"Magic," says Norrell, and frowns.

-

That night Norrell waits until it's dark and the few other servants have gone to bed. Already in his nightshirt, he takes a candle and traverses the hallways. Hurtfew looks different at night, as though all the Gothicness it lacks in the day only reveals itself at night. Or perhaps he's just nervous.

The stairs creak as he mounts them slowly. Melodramatic, he thinks.

Childermass opens the door as he ascends the first step. He's in shirtsleeves, though not a nightshirt.

"You're early," he says.

"I didn't want to risk her appearing too soon." Norrell tries not to let his gaze stray to the wrist that shows itself beneath the revealed sleeve, or to the shape of arm almost visible through the worn linen.

Childermass nods, and jerks his head for Norrell to come in. With two candles, Norrell can see the room much easier than his last view. A small box underneath the bed, a little wash-stand, a cold fireplace, a battered chair. Curious how he'd never really ventured into this room, before all this. Hurtfew has been his for years, and yet when does he ever go into the servants' quarters? There are whole rooms he's never seen. As new, come to think of it, as Childermass in shirtsleeves.

Another small uncovering, the same familiar longing for more and less at the same time.

"This is all very schoolboy, all this skulduggery and sleeping in other folks' rooms," says Norrell, for something to say.

The corner of Childermass's mouth quirks. "Sounds like you had a more interesting time as a schoolboy than I did as an urchin."

Norrell looks away. "Not me, no."

Childermass seems to understand this is a sensitive topic. "I suppose you'll be wanting the bed."

Norrell eyes it dubiously. It's clean but narrow, the blankets rough. "I think not. I shall suffer in the chair and at dawn go down and sleep."

"Please yourself." Childermass sits down and begins to undress.

Norrell turns around, his face suddenly hot. At length, the rustling of cloth ceases.

"You can turn back around now, I'm decent," says Childermass.

But Childermass is not decent. He's in a nightshirt. It's loose at the wrists and open at the throat and that affords a terrible, terrible, awful view of his collarbones. Norrell looks down at the wooden floor and perches gingerly on a chair.

"Childermass," he says, not quite sure why he's doing it except that the proximity to Childermass's bare skin is making his head spin, "Why did you kiss me in the first place?"

Childermass looks up and raises his eyebrows. "T'other night?"

"Yes. No. The night I asked you to call me sir. Why did you ask me if you didn't want it, in the end?"

A long pause. "I did want it."

"Then why did you stop?"

The silence stretches out, more tense. This must be something awful. Norrell braces himself.

At last, Childermass sighs. "When you asked me to call you sir, it became very clear to me that you thought of yourself as a man." He must see Norrell flinch; he adds quickly, "That is not what I object to. What I assumed is that you would wish me to play the part of a woman."

"I don't like women," says Norrell. "Besides that, I thought you were a tribade."

Childermass looks at the ceiling. Norrell has never seen him take quite so much time over answering something. Seeming to choose his words carefully, he says, "I have never been much interested in playing the part of any man's woman. I didn't want what was between us to turn into that."

"But," says Norrell, "But that is how I feel. All my life, I've dreaded the thought of marriage because of that very thing."

"I understand that now. And that is why I kissed you the night before last."

"Oh," says Norrell. He feels that trembling ache opening up inside of his chest again, spurred on by the soft brown vulnerability of Childermass's wrists and the lines of his neck. Emboldened, he says, so quietly he can barely even hear himself: "Perhaps you would like to do it again?"

Childermass looks at him with an expression that's just this side of vulnerability. Always this side, never over. This is Childermass: always at least a little open, like a defiance, and always at least a little closed, like a warning.

"Yes," he says.

Norrell picks his way over to the bed and sits down. As he does, Childermass reaches up to touch Norrell's shoulder. It's clear that this is meant to be the kind of grounding I'm-here touch he and only he occasionally offers to Norrell, but right now it's less grounding than it is conducting. Norrell feels it in his whole body, a soft warm shock spreading through him.

He wonders how Childermass can make him feel like this, when it's only Childermass, the only person who has, for a long time, been altogether safe. He wonders if he could ever make Childermass feel like this, when he's nothing but an unsuccessful woman who stepped into manhood like an ill-fitting suit at age 32 and has yet to tailor it properly. He wonders if all of this is a distraction from magic that he can't afford. He wonders if Childermass would touch him again.

"I have a sneaking suspicion," murmurs Childermass, "that we'll wind up interrupted again."

"I don't care," says Norrell.

They meet halfway. Norrell has managed to tense himself up and his mouth feels tight, but Childermass still kisses like he has all the time in the world. The soft press of his mouth gradually relaxes Norrell's own. The rhythm of it is getting easier now with practice; for people who are more coordinated than Norrell, perhaps this is what dancing is like. Perhaps that's why they like it so much.

Norrell pulls away for breath. Childermass is blinking a little, softer than he usually goes, and the ache intensifies. Does he always look like this in his own bedroom? It comes to him abruptly that Childermass exists not just in Norrell's presence but everywhere. That he makes his way through the world, bold and unconcerned and hard-shelled, every day, in more places than Norrell can count. And here he is now, leaning in for another kiss, reaching to tuck his hand into Norrell's scrubby short hair.

Norrell leans forward and pushes against Childermass, and they go over sideways on the bed. Childermass laughs a little as Norrell clutches him clumsily, touching his hair, his neck. He dares to let his fingers trace the triangle of bare skin between Childermass's collarbones. He trails carefully along the lines of each collarbone, feeling the sharpness of them. His fingers brush down further, along the outline of the shirt. He almost fancies he can hear the fast beating of Childermass's heart echoing into his fingers, into their pressed-together bodies.

Oh.

"Hearts!" says Norrell into Childermass's mouth and jerks himself upright.

Childermass blinks muzzily. "What about them?"

"Hearts! The mandrake! We buried a mandrake root with her, do you not remember?"

"I remember," says Childermass, sitting up and running a hand through his hair. "I'm having trouble grasping the significance at this very moment."

"It was to animate her! I thought perhaps it had grown and made up the bulk of her form, but it must be her heart! That is what fuels her! If we remove the heart, there will be nothing to keep her from falling to pieces!" Norrell gives Childermass an impatient look. "Why are you being so slow?"

"I was very lately distracted," says Childermass, glancing pointedly at Norrell's hands.

"Come." Norrell scrambles off the bed and hunts around for his clothing. "If I can catch her, I can kill her. What time is it?"

"Don't know. Been an hour or half an hour, I'd estimate. I have to emphasize again that I've been distracted."

"Get dressed," says Norrell, throwing pair of breeches at Childermass.

Childermass watches him with an expression that Norrell isn't sure how to characterize: bemused? fond? both? "I did tell you we'd get interrupted."

"Don't worry about that now. I have a limited window of time in which to act and I do not want to wait another whole month in suspense." Norrell wrenches open the door to Childermass's room and begins to scurry down the stairs.

After a few minutes, he hears Childermass's uneven gait behind him.

"How," says Childermass as he catches up at the bottom of the stairs, "do you expect to catch her, when she cannot enter the house?"

"We shall go outside," says Norrell. He pauses. "Childermass, you are a man of action. What would you do to remove the heart from a person?"

Childermass rubs his forehead. "Every time I think working for you couldn't possibly present a new challenge..."

"Don't waffle."

"Given that she's made of earth, I would suggest a spade."

"Very good. Where are the spades kept?"

"This is _your_ house."

"I don't go looking on the grounds."

Childermass sighs. "Follow me, sir."

From an outbuilding, a spade is fetched. Norrell looks anxiously at the moon, but it is not yet setting: perhaps they still have time. After some thought, he puts himself and Childermass right outside the window to his bedroom.

"Do you think she will come?" Norrell looks around. The land around them looks flat and bare.

"Don't see why she'd miss it now," says Childermass, settling himself to lean against the wall.

It seems a long time of waiting until she appears. In the uncrowded landscape, he can see her for feet and feet away, approaching with a slow and leisurely walk that seems almost designed to terrify. Norrell looks anxiously over at Childermass, who is gripping the spade.

"When she comes, you stab her," he says, twisting his hands together.

Childermass nods.

Norrell's breath grows shallower and shallower as she approaches. Childermass's shoulders are tight, his hands tighter on the spade-handle.

Finally, as Phyllis comes within range, he strikes.

Norrell waits for the blow to land, but it never does. Phyllis, with speed that seems unfair in an animated clay doll, moves out of the way, and Childermass overbalances and falls. She looks at him, wild for a moment, and then begins to run away.

Norrell doesn't think.

"Wait!" he calls, scrambling after her. Childermass does not follow; he is sitting on the ground, holding his ankle. That will have to be looked after later: this, Norrell must do now. "Wait! Phyllis!"

Phyllis slows, turns. Her pale eyes catch the moonlight as she stands still, watching him.

"I have come to return you to the earth," he says, panting as he draws close. If only he was more used to exercise. "Just as I promised."

She stretches out her hands. Like a statue of a saint she stands there, still, imploring with only her posture, and Norrell takes a step, and then another, and then another, and then rests his hand on her sternum.

Her body feels soft, no firmer than clay. Had she always been so loosely-knit? How had no one realized? Had no one ever touched her when she was dying? Norrell's hand pushes through the earth and finds something hard at the center.

He pulls.

Phyllis seems to sigh, and her face relaxes: no longer stone, it is instead the soft rich dirt of newly-tilled field. And then it is nothing at all, for she falls to piece, scattering into the grass until there is nothing left of her at all.

Nothing left, that is, except one thing: in his hand hand, stained red-brown with the earth, is a gnarled, knotty mandrake root.

-

For two weeks, Phyllis has been dead. Norrell is certain she's not going to come back. He'd burned the mandrake root at her heart as soon as he had helped Childermass indoors and up to his room. (The ankle had not been badly sprained, only a little twisted.)

And yet, and yet.

He lives rather as though waiting for news of a war. Going through daily tasks, but not minding them. Opening letters, reading them, replying in a haze. This one, he notes, has a familiar surname, Haythornethwaite. Curious: he had not known there were any others in Yorkshire, save his mother's family...

A prick of fear darts through the fog and lands in the back of his neck.

Mark Haythornethwaite. Not a familiar name; Norrell's uncle had been a John. The letter addresses itself to _Gilbert Norrell, Esq_ and it begs leave to visit, as Mr Haythornthwaite would be in the area of Hurtfew and he wished to offer his condolences on the tragic death of Mr Norrell's sister, whom he remembered fondly.

Norrell has a wild and horrible moment of duality: _I don't know him, did Phyllis?_ He's so used to thinking of her as outside himself that he forgets for a moment that he has ever lived her life. Of course she didn't know this man. He notes an earlier introduction: _I was your uncle's cousin and we were very close as children._ This will be that Mark, then, the one Uncle Haythornethwaite periodically mentioned getting in trouble with. He is, Norrell thinks, still in industry.

After a long and tiring moment of thought, he rings the bell for Childermass, who appears with his usual celerity. Norrell passes him the letter wordlessly.

"Relations," says Childermass, as he finishes it, "are one of the curses of rich men."

"I doubt he needs money," says Norrell woodenly. "He has probably come to expose me."

"Expose you as what?"

That strange duality again: Norrell feels unmoored, as if he was never Phyllis but was never anything else before this, either. Then he settles back into his own body. "As my sister."

"Ah. I think that unlikely; it may be, however, that he wants to expose you as her murderer."

"That is nearly as bad."

"It is not, as you did not murder her."

"I did," says Norrell. "I only just finished."

"Be easy," says Childermass. For a moment his hand rests against the back of Norrell's shoulders. "All will be well. Invite him to stay a night, give him a chance to air his grievances. That will probably be enough for him. And perhaps he does only want to offer condolences."

This, Norrell thinks, is unlikely. In his experience the worst-case scenario is usually the one that happens. But Childermass knows the right thing to do, and so he writes to Mark Haythornethwaite and says that he would be very happy to receive him at Hurtfew in a week's time.

When the day comes, Norrell feels ill. At the end, to have finally done away with the consequences of his actions, and then to be tripped at the final moment by an inconvenient relative. If the man makes an accusation, can he prove it? Of course anyone could prove it by forcing Norrell to remove his clothes. He feels gripped tight with fear. If he gives him enough money to be quiet...

And Childermass cannot be there -- of course. Servants are not to eat with guests. Norrell will have to do this on his own.

Mark Haythornethwaite arrives, and is given a guest room. Norrell hears the murmur of the maid's voice and the tread of footsteps. He does not emerge to greet him.

How is a man supposed to greet a relative he has never met? Norrell scarcely knows how to do it as a woman. Is there a difference? Is it different depending upon the sex of the relative? This had all seemed so very simple six months ago.

At supper, Norrell arrives early and rises to Haythornethwaite mechanically.

"Thank you for the gracious invitation," Haythornethwaite says.

Norrell murmurs something polite that he forgets as soon as it's gone and adds, "You must be hungry after your journey. What did you say brought you to Yorkshire?"

"Ah," says Haythornethwaite, and spends most of the rest of supper talking of mills. This is a subject upon which Norrell feels able to be polite, having, as he does, absolutely no opinion. And yet Haythornethwaite did not come to talk of mills. Norrell picks at the roast chicken and potatoes.

They retire to the sitting room with brandy, which Norrell does not drink. He's already ill enough without adding something that will upset his stomach. Why won't Haythornethwaite get to the point?

Finally, the conversation -- somewhat one-sided as it is -- drifts round. "Very sad, your sister's sudden death," Haythornethwaite says.

Norrell mumbles agreement.

"You two were close, were you?"

"Not especially. No."

Haythornethwaite swirls his glass. "I never heard that John had a nephew as well as a niece."

Norrell's stomach twists and he holds his glass so tightly he's afraid it'll break. "He wasn't very fond of me. I am a practical magician."

"Ah," says Haythornethwaite. "Not the sort of faffing John would approve of."

Norrell shrugs. In his head, he's saying goodbye to the clothes he's grown so comfortable in, to living in Hurtfew, to the library, to Childermass, for surely if he is exposed he will be made to leave town. No one would abide such a horrible creature to live near their children.

"Your sister was a magician too, wasn't she?"

"She studied theoretical magic."

"Unusual interest in a woman," says Haythornethwaite.

The faint ghost of Phyllis rebels inside of Norrell. "The tale of English magic is a thing every English man and woman should know, especially in the North, for it intimately concerns their own history," he says into the glass.

Haythornethwaite shrugs as, mentally, Norrell says goodbye to Gilbert.

"Is that," Haythornethwaite says, "the avenue by which you entrapped her?"

For a moment, Norrell can't fathom who 'her' is supposed to refer to. "I'm sorry?" he says, too astonished to bother concealing the open bewilderment on his face.

"She wasn't your sister at all," says Haythornethwaite. "There was never any Gilbert Norrell. You seduced her and entrapped her and when she died, she left the house to you, along with all her money. Admit it, man. You don't even look like a Norrell. You've got neither your mother nor your father's eyes."

This is so close to and so far from Norrell's terrors that all he can do is sit there with his mouth open. He says the first thing that comes to his mind: "My eyes are blue, just as hers were."

"Cecy had green eyes."

"She most assuredly did not!" says Norrell, seizing onto this as something he's finally able to argue against. "I have a portrait of her in the hall, you know. They are not only the same colour but the same shape as mine. How long had it been since you had spoken to her when she died?"

"A few years," admits Haythornethwaite. "The eye colour was a mere illustration. I cannot stand by and see my cousin's legacy wasted by a yellow-curtained scoundrel."

Norrell feels the enraged trembling in his heart spreading down to his hands. "My inheritance did not even come from Phyllis. Hurtfew has been mine all along. It's in the will. I will show you."

Haythornethwaite is beginning to look embarrassed. "I am sure there's no need--"

But Norrell pulls the bell-cord fiercely. In due time, Childermass appears. How he always knows when Norrell needs him, and not one of the other servants...

"Fetch the will my uncle left," he says coldly, "There is some confusion about it."

Childermass gives a mocking little bow.

When he returns, Norrell thrusts the will at Haythornethwaite. "If you would be so good, sir."

Haythornethwaite looks at it for some time. Then he clears his throat. "Well, I admit that this seems to be telling, but it might, perhaps, be faked."

"You may ask me anything," says Norrell, vibrating with the first real jolt of righteous indignation he's felt in months. "Anything at all. It may have been years since we spoke amicably, but I know my own uncle well enough."

"What was his favorite food?"

"Jellied eels," says Norrell promptly, "He acquired a taste for them in London and he used to order the cook to make them. The smell was dreadful."

"She could have told you that."

"Would you like to ask me questions about her?" says Norrell. He feels distant and dizzy and delirious. This is far too close for comfort. "Do you think I don't know my own sister well enough to answer anything? Did you know her well enough to know what to ask?"

Haythornethwaite looks at him a long moment, and then sighs. "You must forgive me," he says, "it was only that I thought -- well, the circumstances do look suspicious, do they not?"

Norrell only glares. "I think it would be best if you left tomorrow to find a new location for your mill."

Haythornthwaite bows a little. "With your leave, I will retire."

"Thank you."

Childermass comes to his room as soon as he's in, ostensibly to help him undress. "You got through it, it sounds like," he says as Norrell throws off his coat angrily.

"That man accused me of ruining and coercing my own sister! He said I wasn't a Norrell at all because my eyes didn't look like my mother's!"

"Now that's absurd," says Childermass, taking Norrell's hand and undoing a cuff button, "I've seen her portrait in the hall, you're very like her."

"I know!" Norrell looks around for something else to toss, but lacking anything, he settles into the rhythm of Childermass's undressing. "Of all the absurd things!"

"I did tell you. People won't be looking at the things you're afraid of."

"Oh," says Norrell. "I convinced him."

A slow smile spreads across Childermass's face. "If you can convince your uncle's cousin..."

"Oh," says Norrell again, feeling dazed and stupid. He's made it.

Phyllis is dead, and this last hurdle, the one he'd been so sure would take him down, he's jumped it without a second thought, carried on a tide of outrage. Slowly, he sits down on the bed; Childermass puts a hand on his shoulder.

"I'm Gilbert," he says nonsensically. "I must have always been really, haven't I? I couldn't have convinced him if I was not myself, the whole time."

"I generally find the best way to lie is to tell the truth in a way that suits me," says Childermass. "I believe you have fulfilled that strategy admirably."

Norrell can't imagine acquiring that skill successfully for general purposes, but, he thinks, it doesn't matter. He's done what he needed to with it.

-

Two weeks later, the small part of Norrell's brain that is exclusively dedicated to worrying is insisting that the upcoming moon is _really_ the one last hurdle that will trip him, the final downfall.

"Childermass," he says, eyes fixed on the desk, "it is the full moon tonight."

"So it is."

Norrell pinches his fingers together. "I know she won't be back but for the sake of safety, one last time, perhaps you would guard me?"

Childermass looks up at Norrell. Norrell hopes that none of what he really means by this request is showing, and hopes that Childermass can discern that meaning anyhow.

He has not touched Childermass in any significant way since Phyllis died. For once, not fear, but contemplation. After all the interruptions and all the disturbance, it had felt appropriate to take time to consider. The space between them is not so much tense as full of understanding. And now, Norrell thinks, the time for waiting is, perhaps, over.

"I could do that," Childermass says slowly. "Better safe than sorry."

"Aye." Norrell twiddles his fingers some more. "It is nearly dark now. Perhaps you might lock up and come along, unless you feel you would be seen."

"I'm very good at making myself unseeable," says Childermass, rising from his chair.

Norrell forces himself to work for another fifteen minutes before he puts his notes down. He takes the time to put all the books he's had out back in their proper places, and to put all the pens and the inkwell back on the desk where they belong. He walks to his bedroom slowly, as he is accustomed to when there is nothing pressing.

When he opens the door, Childermass is leaning against the wall and smirking crookedly at him.

"That was a very prompt lockup," says Norrell.

"I'm very efficient," says Childermass, and somehow it sounds like a promise.

Norrell closes the door with a soft click.

Childermass's warm dark eyes follow him as he locks it and puts the key on the table. With a slowness born more of nervousness than deliberation, he lifts his head.

"Ask me," says Childermass.

Norrell's mouth feels dry. "Will you make me ask every time?"

"Is that a request for this to be a consistent addition to your routine?"

Norrell down at the carpet. "You want to protect your paycheck, you said."

Childermass's mouth quirks up. "After all your talk about rumours bothering servants."

"If you find it disagreeable, you are free to leave," says Norrell, stung.

"I wouldn't be here if I found it disagreeable; I was teasing you," says Childermass, pushing himself off the wall. "You still haven't asked me."

"Do you enjoy inconveniencing me?"

Childermass raises his eyebrows.

With a feeling of inevitability, Norrell gives up. "Please, then."

Childermass has the ability to move quite quickly when he wants to, and therefore the relaxed pace at which he meanders across the room must be deliberate evidence that he does, in fact, enjoy inconveniencing Norrell. When presents himself with a little bow, Norrell grabs him by the collar and kisses him.

Childermass laughs a little against Norrell's lips. That ache comes back, but Norrell ignores it. There is time, now, time to worry about things and time to study what is important and time for diversions on quiet full moon nights where Childermass slinks his careful way into Norrell's bedroom.

"No more interruptions on the horizon?" Childermass asks.

"I should hope not." Norrell thinks about the conclusions he's come to over the past month. "I believe I should tell you that I don't want you to fuck me."

"That's good," says Childermass, "I don't have the equipment for it at the moment. Although I'm good at improvising."

"At the _moment_? Do you have a device that can grow a cock?"

Childermass snorts. "What do you want?"

"I don't know." What does he want? What is allowed? What are the options? It occurs to him again that he has time to find out now. Time enough and more. "What do _you_ want?"

Childermass smiles a dangerous sideways smile.

-

Norrell wakes at midnight out of habit. For a moment he tenses, sure that some noise will have startled him from sleep, but he listens for a very long time and there is nothing at all, nothing that he can make out.

Beside him, Childermass stirs. "There's nothing there," he says sleepily.

Norrell feels a little struck by the way Childermass knows exactly what to say, even when he's just woken up. Childermass understands: what does Childermass not understand. Again he is conscious of that peculiar mix of gratitude and anger, that Childermass should know him so well. That Childermass should always understand. It is an awful thing to be known. "No," he says, "there isn't. Did I wake you?"

With a sigh, Childermass sits up a little. "No, I woke myself."

"Ah," says Norrell with perfect understanding.

They lay there for a little while, the soft illumination of the moonlight turning the room from ordinary to beautiful. Norrell wonders if he ought to get up and close the curtains, but he decides he can't be bothered.

"Childermass?" he says into the half-darkness.

"Mm?"

"How do you manage?"

"I manage a lot of things. You'll have to be more specific."

Norrell is thinking about his first impression of Childermass as someone impossible to call by her first name, and of his later impression as someone who has taken the best of manhood and womanhood. "You managed to change yourself over so smoothly. From a woman to a man. How?"

Childermass makes a thoughtful noise and rubs his face. "You'd be amazed at what you can do with a lie, sir."

"I'm being serious."

"So am I. If I seem at ease to you, it's because I've spent many years cultivating it. I learned to be a man down in docks and on ships: do you think I knew how to be one in the house of a gentleman?"

Norrell blinks. It seems entirely improbable that Childermass should ever be at a loss for anything - for words, for behavior, for knowledge. "And yet you are one."

"That is because I have the trick of adapting my environment to suit me."

"You've certainly adapted my household to suit you."

There's a smirk audible in Childermass's voice: "You see what I mean."

Norrell harrumphs. "But I cannot adapt the whole world to suit me, and if I am to fulfill my ambition to bring magic back, I must go out into the world."

"You adapt it to _accept_ you," says Childermass. "That's the trick. Act as though you belong somewhere, and no one will think to question it. If you're frightened that some one will take you for something other than a natural-born man, act as though you expect people to assume it."

"It's a sort of magic," says Norrell, with the sudden feeling that something very important has been unlocked inside his head. Of course it's a kind of magic; everything important is.

Norrell must fall back asleep soon after; the next thing he remembers is blinking awake in the dim light of a muffled dawn. Childermass is gone; he has closed the curtains, so that the light did not wake Norrell up. A small act of consideration. But that is Childermass.

Norrell rises and looks around the room. Everything is in its place. His suit is on the chair, waiting to be put on. The night has passed with no disturbances.

Phyllis is dead, he thinks, pulling open the curtains, wondering at the sudden brightness of the light. Phyllis is dead. And I am alive, and it is morning.


	7. epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a chapter before this, if you did not see it! I just wanted to wrap up with Childermass's point of view because I'd started there.

The cold winter light streams through the library window as Childermass drops yesterday's post on the desk and goes to sit down in his accustomed desk. The list of the day's tasks grows ever-longer every month: right now, he's looking for a new coachman to replace the one who's just retired. He has a feeling they'll be in need of the services of a good one. The cards have been hinting at upheaval lately: only last night he got the Hanged Man.

Norrell is settled in his own desk, looking comfortable and content in the soft shadows of the corner. He puts on his reading glasses and begins opening his letters as Childermass watches him.

Childermass thinks about York, the way he tends to, and about how much Norrell has changed since they met, and about how much he hasn't changed. He watches a little frown and an expression of disgust drift across Norrell's face, watches the way his mouth turns down at the corners. After sixteen years, Childermass can almost predict the exact angle it'll skew at.

"Do you remember the York Society?" Norrell asks him, glaring at the letter.

"They asked you to join them some years ago, did they not?"

"Yes. Very impertinent of them. If I recall, I asked you to break them up."

"Haven't got around to it," says Childermass. He pulls a letter from his cousin Aditya over to himself and inspects it: the lad's got a new job, it seems. "I'm a very busy man, you know."

Odd how that word -- _man_ \-- comes so naturally now. It is not that he ever struggled: it is only that once it had felt a pure necessity, a convenience, and then it had been exciting and full of potential, and now it is as comfortable as an old coat.

Norrell tuts. "You're much too late. Look at this. Two of the members have written asking to _visit_ me. They want to see my library. Of all the temerity..."

Childermass rises and takes the letter. John Segundus: he thinks he knows that name. Some publication Norrell had been reading. "The question of why there is no longer any magic done in England," he reads aloud.

"Ridiculous. Foolish."

"A question you asked yourself some years ago," says Childermass absently. "It did well for you."

Norrell makes a rather displeased noise. "I shall tell them no."

The difficult thing about Norrell is that he has Habits, and one has to overcome the if one wants to encourage him to do anything. "You want me to break them up, do you not?"

"Didn't I just say so?"

"And you want to make your reputation by an act of magic."

Norrell makes a sour face.

"You'll need to interact with other magicians at some point," Childermass reminds him. "This may be the way that costs you the least effort."

Norrell heaves a great and put-upon sigh, and Childermass knows that he has won. "Very well, then."

Childermass pulls a sheet of paper out of his desk to begin a draft. He no longer needs to ask if Norrell would like him to compose it. Norrell will write a fair copy in his own hand, show it to Childermass if he has made any changes, and it will be sent out.

This is Childermass after a decade and more in Norrell's service: stronger and not quite so thin, but still twisted, always twisted. He can still pick a pocket if he has to, but it's less and less important nowadays. He and Norrell have molded to each other, two trees growing in the same forest, become almost seamless.

This is Childermass after a decade and more: a man in a gentleman's house, with no doubt at all in his heart.

He thinks about the reading last night: the Hanged Man, Ace of Swords, Three of Wands.

It's starting.


End file.
